


Nexus

by corngold



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: ...het!preslash?, Bodyswap, F/M, Humour, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-22
Updated: 2013-06-02
Packaged: 2017-12-12 14:26:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/812595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corngold/pseuds/corngold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Avon wakes up one morning in someone else's bed.  It all goes downhill from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Problem

**Author's Note:**

> Unbetaed (mistakes which I'm sure abound are deeply regretted)

The first thing Avon notices is the hair. He blinks blearily and swipes at it, and there is a split second in which he remembers that he hasn’t had hair long enough to fall in his face since his boyhood, and then that his hair is not and has never been that colour, long or short. Good god, had he gone to bed with someone the night previous? He shoves himself up onto an elbow and turns to look, and the hair moves with him, falling out of his face and down onto his shoulder. He blinks at it. It seems to be attached to his head.

Vila’s idea of a prank? He reaches a hand up to feel and freezes, staring at the delicate fingers and long nails, and then the rest of it swamps him in a rush. Breasts. And a…lack of other things. Things that he is fairly sure are normally attached to him when he wakes up, instead of long golden hair and breasts.

“Oh this is a joke,” he murmurs, voice higher than normal and the inflections all wrong. That settles it, as though the anatomy switch hadn’t. His brain is in Jenna’s body, and he is speaking in her voice and lying in her sheets and wearing a rather attractive shimmery silver sleeping robe, which clasps at the shoulders and drapes down her body to tangle around her knees under the bedclothes.

“Oh no,” he says, and then the door to his bedroom—Jenna’s bedroom—bursts open. He finds himself, eerily, staring back at himself.

“Avon?” his body gasps. “Avon, please let that be you; is that you?”

“Yes,” he answers, swinging a pair of bare and rather lovely legs out of bed. “Jenna, I assume?”

“Oh thank god,” Jenna gasps, collapsing back against the open door with eyes closed in relief and a hand pressed to her stomach. It looks entirely wrong on his body.

“Perhaps shutting the door might be a good first move,” he suggests, and winces, clearing his throat a few times. Jenna’s voice doesn’t quite work with his particular flavour of sarcasm—it can’t do bone-dry with near enough precision.

“Yes, all right.” She steps into the room and closes the door behind her. He eyes his body critically, noting the wild hair and the hastily donned robe, and hopes she hadn’t met anyone in _Liberator’s_ halls on her mad dash to her own room. The worry helps to keep his mind off the fact that he is sitting awkwardly in her body, trying not to breathe lest he feel anything more than the absolute minimum. Foolish, perhaps, but he has the horrible notion that if he tries even to stand, his whole world and sanity will come crashing down around him. If, of course, it hasn’t already.

After all, Jenna apparently sleeps like a princess in white silk sheets and a robe like stardust. Avon sleeps in the nude. If Jenna’s reaction to their predicament had been anything like his—well, it had probably been a hundred times worse for her. At least he hasn’t had to acknowledge bare flesh. Yet.

“Avon, what is this? How did it happen?”

“How should I know?” he snaps. “Something we drank?”

“Don’t be facetious, it doesn’t help.”

“Probably not, but when has that mattered?”

Her voice rises. “You may be enjoying my body—”

“I can assure you, lovely though it is, that is most emphatically not the case.”

“—but no offense intended, I most certainly am not enjoying yours. Avon, whatever this is, we need to fix it.” Avon inclines his head in acknowledgement, and Jenna pauses. “Gosh, that looks odd on me.” And then her lips twitch, and then she’s giggling. In his body.

“Heavens, stop, leave me some dignity,” Avon murmurs, pained and amused all at once. He very carefully reaches out to pat the bed beside him. “Come on, you’d better sit. You’re right, the sooner we fix this, the better.”

“I’m sorry,” she answers, still smiling, and walks to join him. Her stride is awkward in his body, feet taking steps much farther from each other than is necessary. “But there is a funny side.” She sits gingerly. “I may have bruised something, running here. I hadn’t noticed, I was in such a panic, but I’m afraid...I’m not quite sure how your anatomy works with normal movement.”

Avon can think of a million snide comments and a few hundred humorous jokes, but he ignores them all in favour of the more logical. 

“We’ll have to assist each other quite a lot, I’m afraid. I’ve taken clothing off women but I’ve never put it back on them. Or washed them or combed their hair or done their make-up. Mind if I go without any of that?” he asks, with little hope that she’ll agree. “It wouldn’t much help our predicament in the grand scheme of things, I’ll admit, but at this point every little bit helps.”

“I guess it depends,” Jenna says, “on whether we want to tell the rest of the crew.”

Avon opens his mouth to ask, ‘why wouldn’t we?’ and then pauses. It’s a fair question. Logic would dictate that the more minds working on this, the sooner they’ll find a solution. Personal pride demands taking the secret with him to the grave. And Jenna Stannis is as proud as he is. Even through his face, which she doesn’t know how to wear, he can tell how uncomfortable she is with the idea.

“Hmm. A valid point,” he says. “The teasing would be unbearable.”

“Vila would be unbearable,” she answers with another smile. Avon doubts he’s put his face through as many smiles in his entire life as Jenna just has. If she’s not careful the muscles in his cheeks will begin to cramp.

“Blake too, no doubt.”

“Blake would be very careful and very understanding.”

“Exactly.”

“So agreed. A secret?”

“A secret,” he agrees.

“Then where do we start? I’d like to dress…and I’d like to bathe, come to that…and I’d like your body not to be seen coming out of my cabin wearing nothing but a bathrobe.”

“You didn’t bring any clothes with you, did you?” he asks, knowing it for a pointless question.

“Wouldn’t know what to bring. And,” she admits, “I rather had other things on my mind.”

“Under the circumstances, I should think so. Well,” he says, and stands. He stares down at the breasts tenting out the nightdress for a moment and quashes the panic that tries to wash up his throat and overwhelm him. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Bathing. Any tips?”

Jenna blushes. It’s not a good look for Avon’s face: his skin goes blotchy white around his jaw and mouth and fiery pink over his cheekbones, and his eyes glitter feverishly. Jenna, he remembers, looks much prettier when she flushes. And she does it more often than he. Something he’ll have to keep in mind.

“No,” she tells him, “it is a body after all. The pieces are different but the principle is the same. Wash everywhere. You’ll have to use two different kinds of soap on my hair: a mild cleanser and a restorative cream. They’re clearly labelled; you shouldn’t have any trouble.”

“I do have hair of my own,” he snaps, and watches his eyebrow raise and her mouth twitch on his face.

“Really? Well they say men are just as vain about their appearance as women.”

Avon scowls at her.

“You go first then. Avon,” she calls out as he turns to leave. “Do you think—do you think it might be easier to do this together? We know our own bodies, after all. I don’t know about you, but I’m…I wouldn’t want to invade your privacy.”

He considers. It’s very appealing, because he knows exactly what she means. The idea of running soapy hands down the body he’s in is terrifying for any number of reasons, and though not as immediate, so is the idea of Jenna running her hands down his. But even if it’s not his body, he’ll feel when someone touches it. It will ultimately be less embarrassing, he knows, to deal with any physical reactions alone than together.

“No,” he says at last. “Tempting though it is to avoid dealing with this in a hands-on approach,” he grins humourlessly at her, “I have a distinct suspicion that if we get into a shower and start washing each other, we’ll be having sex in moments. And that’s not something I think I’m prepared for. Or will _ever_ be prepared for.”

“Fair enough,” she agrees. “All right. I’ll wait here; just call me if you need anything. I’ll get some clothes out for you.”

“Now that,” Avon admits readily, “I would not mind help with at all.”

 

~*~

 

It’s not as dreadful as it could be—certainly not as easy to set this body off, accidentally, as it is to set off his own, though he can feel a faint desire coiling and rolling low in his belly every now and again. He is deeply thankful that his own body, with Jenna in it, is not currently sharing the shower. He has a suspicion his back would be against the tiles and his legs wrapped around his waist by now—and isn’t that an unusual turn of phrase? So no, it isn’t as dreadful as it could be. He washes quickly in a sort of general and impersonal fashion, and then concentrates dedicatedly on the hair. It’s true that he is no stranger to hair cleansers, but Jenna has at least twice the amount of hair he has and it keeps getting tangled when he soaps it and the whole process ends up taking much longer.

He dries off and searches around for a comb and jerks it through the tangles, wincing—if he weren’t sure that Jenna would in turn take the scissors to important parts of his anatomy, he’d be tempted to just cut this all off—and then wraps the towel around her body and heads back into her bedroom. She’s sitting on the bed again, a pile of clothing beside her.

“Come here,” she says, standing and holding out a hand for the towel. Her expression is stoic. “You’ve nothing I haven’t seen before, and this will go easier with my help.”

Avon submits readily enough. He steps into the pants with no trouble but is happy to leave the bra and the clasping of it to Jenna. Thousands of years of human history, and no one’s managed to come up with more reasonable female garments? It’s absurd, and it’s nothing Avon would ever have considered before, which makes it more absurd. The trousers are simple but difficult, considering how much tighter they are than what he’s used to. The blouse too isn’t too bad—she’s chosen the one with the watercolour splotches, which she lifts over his head for him so he can easily fit his arms into it. No laces, no zippers, no buttons, no clasps for him to fumble with. He feels like a four year old with mummy helping dress him. Or daddy, in this case.

“The hair I’ll do for you,” she says, and they troupe back into the bathroom, and there follow two of the most aggravating and infuriating hours of Avon’s life as she dries it and then takes a machine and blows it into a poof and then takes an iron and straightens the wayward frizz and then takes a comb and creates elaborate frills and curls and then takes a spray bottle and, ordering him to shut his eyes, creates a cloud of smelly water vapour around his head to hold it all together. He does threaten to cut it all off, and she does, even as he expected she would, threaten to cut off something of his own in retaliation.

“Done,” she declares finally, when Avon’s sure that if they stand in front of the mirror any longer he’ll do something unhelpful and unmanly, like scream.

“About time,” he tells her, relieved beyond all possible reckoning. “Now you.”

“Don’t go back to your room for clothes,” she tells him, dragging out a fresh towel from the linen cupboard. “The last thing I want is anyone to see me heading in there.”

“I could possibly take offense,” he says idly, because really he couldn’t. He’d had the same thought when she’d come bursting in at the beginning of all this. Something she’d said earlier springs back to mind. “No one saw you on the way here, this morning?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she answers, and directs that wry smile of hers at him. It’s starting to fit his face better. “Though I wasn’t paying too much attention, you know.”

He nods. “I’ll go to the wardrobe room. Do you have a satchel? Your body carrying back an armful of men’s clothes would raise questions, no matter where you’d gotten them.”

“Check my closet,” she says, turning away, squaring his shoulders and starting to unbelt his robe. “There’s bound to be something.”

In respect for her modesty and his own, he beats a hasty retreat.

 

 ~*~

 

He’s considering his hands and wondering why they feel so odd—odder than the rest of him does—when he hears someone call out.

“Jenna!”

If there’s one thing to be said for the discomfort of wearing another person’s body, Avon reflects as he slows and turns to face Blake, it’s that it’s impossible to slip up and forget who you’re supposed to be. The problem then, he thinks, taking a deep breath and attempting to paste a welcoming look on his face, is behaving like them.

“Is something wrong?” Blake asks as he draws level, and Avon guesses his expression falls far short of the warm smile he’d been going for.

“An upset stomach.” He says the first thing that comes to mind. “I didn’t sleep well, that’s all.”

Blake smiles kindly and says, “I’m sorry,” and puts a hand on Jenna’s arm, and it takes everything Avon has not to flinch away in surprise.

“Thank you,” he says, and hopes Blake can’t hear how strained Jenna’s voice sounds. “I’m sure I’ll be fine. Is there something going on?”

“Ah. Yes, have you seen Avon?”

He’s been carefully sorting through everything he might be asked and the various answers he ought to give, and somehow the possibility of that question hadn’t occurred to him at all.

“Erm, no,” he answers finally, after considering and discarding several alternatives. He doesn’t add, ‘should I have?’—it sounds too guilty—but it’s a near thing.

“If you do, ask him to come to the teleport room?”

Avon tries another smile and it still feels strained but not as strained as before.

“Of course,” he says.

 

 ~*~

 

He manages to return to Jenna’s cabin with a satchel of clothing and no one the wiser. He finds Jenna sitting on her bed, towel wrapped around her—his—her?—waist.

“You were a while,” she says.

“Ran into Blake,” he answers. “I brought a few things, as I’m not sure…should we recreate this little support group again tomorrow? Or do you want to give it a go alone? Always assuming we don’t find a cure today or that this doesn’t miraculously clear up on its own.”

“It’s not acne,” she jokes. “I don’t know, I think one practice run is all we’ll need, don’t you?”

“If you think I can recreate this hair on my own,” he tells her, dumping the satchel on the bed beside his body, “you are delusional.”

“You may have a point."  She rummages through it for a moment before giving up and up-ending the whole thing over the sheets. "All right, what have we got?”

He hands her pants, trousers, and tunic silently, and she struggles gamely into them with a few marginally embarrassing but necessary suggestions from him. He leaves her with the shoes and belt. He’s never really been self-conscious, but he does feel a twinge of discomfiture watching her clothe his body. He’s not in bad form, but he’d been fitter in his youth. There’s a bit of middle-aged pudge around his stomach that he wishes he’d managed to keep off.

“When you’ve finished with that,” he tells her, “Blake wants to see me in the teleport room. You’d better go meet him there.” He bears his teeth at her.

She’s tugging on the second shoe, and she looks up at him as she slips a finger between his heel and the shoe back until it sits comfortably.

“Lose that expression,” she tells him. “It doesn’t work on my face.”

“Right.” He turns and heads for the door.

“Avon,” his voice calls behind him.

“Mm?”

“I wear jewellery. Over there,” she nods toward a mirrored desk. Avon considers going without, but he studies her hands anyway, more closely than he had in the hallway. He slides rings over the fingers with slight indentations, and _hmms_ briefly.

“What is it?”

“I’m just surprised at how much more comfortable it feels. It would seem the human body carries physical memories, as the brain carries electrical ones. I don’t wear rings, but these hands obviously do. It is…interesting.”

“From a scientific standpoint, this is a remarkable opportunity,” she agrees.

“Perhaps.” Avon turns on his heels to face her. “But do you feel a strong desire to indulge in a lot of scientific experimentation? Or shall we do our best to suffer through the situation and get out of it as soon as possible?”

“The latter. And as far as suffering though this goes—“

“Yes?”

“Blake, and the teleport system. I have some basic technical knowledge, but I’m hardly a computer expert.”

“I’ll contrive to drop by, then, in a few minutes. On the chance that it is my technical expertise Blake is hoping for, rather than my scintillating conversation.”

“Thank you. And Avon?”

“Yes, what is it?” he asks, turning back.

“On the chance that this _doesn’t_ somehow ‘clear itself up,’ as you put it…”

“Yes?”

She looks at him for a long moment. “I’m due to start my cycle in a week.”

He blinks back at her, waiting for anything constructive to occur to him to say. When nothing does he gives up and murmurs desperately, “You’re joking."

“Sorry.”

“I may be forced to throw myself into the nearest black hole.”

“Don’t you dare,” she says. “That’s my body you’re in.”

 

 ~*~

 

Avon gets something to eat and then follows after Jenna. He finds her with Blake, heads bent over the ominously gutted teleport controls.

“—no way to keep it from shorting out because I’ve had to disconnect the backup drive,” Blake’s murmuring. “What do you think?”

“Mm,” Jenna grunts shortly. It’s a reasonable if unimaginative impression of Avon at his most taciturn, deep in thought.

“What’s going on?” Avon asks, bounding down the stairs and feeling his curls bouncing around his shoulders. He feels absurd, like a circus act, and Jenna shoots him a look that’s halfway between horror and hilarity.

Blake doesn’t seem to notice, which Avon takes to mean that it was a decent impersonation, whatever Jenna thinks of it.

“Zen reported a small malfunction in the circuitry here,” he explains. “When I couldn’t find Avon I thought I might try fixing it myself.”

“Ha!” Jenna barks. “Not one of your better schemes, Blake; you should have waited for me.”

“True,” he says readily.

There is a beep from the speakers. “ _Blake_?”

Blake heads for the wall and presses a thumb against the communicator.

“Blake here.”

“ _Blake I’ve been thinking…_ ” Vila’s voice begins.

“Never a good sign,” Avon mutters. Jenna elbows him and directs his attention toward the mess of wires under their hands.

“I know enough about electronics to know he’s right about the short-circuiting,” she murmurs. “But I’ve no idea where or how to begin fixing it.”

“Vila!” they hear Blake exclaim. They glance up to see him running a hand across his face.

“ _It’s not my fault!_ ” the communicator wails.

Blake's voice is dangerously patient. “Then whose fault is it, Vila?”

“ _Well. I didn’t think he’d…well._ ”

Avon tunes them out again as he and Jenna go to work. A few minutes later Blake says, “I’ll be back, Gan’s in medical.” Jenna elbows him again. It takes him a moment to realise he’s meant to care.

“Is he all right?” he asks, looking up. Jenna’s hair falls into his face and he fantasises yet again about chopping it all off.

“Alcohol poisoning.”

“What?” Avon scoffs. Beside him Jenna looks up as well.

“But there’s none on board,” she says coolly.

“Apparently Vila had the bright idea of reprogramming the food synthesisers. Avon, any ideas how he might have managed it?” Blake’s tone is entirely innocent and his expression entirely knowing. Avon looks to Jenna, curious to see how she’ll answer.

“I had nothing to do with it,” Jenna answered. Her expression is steady but she kicks him in the ankle, where Blake can’t see.

“A story for another time,” he tells her under his breath as Blake, shaking his head, vanishes down the corridor.

“Wonderful. So now I'm lying for you, and completely innocently,” she accuses.

He grins back. “I knew there had to be some advantage to this situation.”

 

 ~*~

 

He’s not used to walking around in four-inch heels, though this body evidently is. He’s not used to his centre of gravity sitting lower and less heavy, or his hips and chest swaying as he walks, or his trousers clinging to his thighs. Jenna’s hair continually falls into his face and her eyelashes, long and darkened with mascara, flutter at the upper edges of his vision and distract him.

If the universe shows him any real kindness at all in this fiasco, it’s that his first day as a woman passes fairly uneventfully. They make no foolhardy attacks on the Federation; there are no hostile take-overs, no meteor storms or gravitational whirlpools. Despite the relative quiet, neither he nor Jenna come up with any idea of how this might have happened, or how it might be reversed.

They fix the teleport system. Cally finds Gan some kind of hangover remedy and Blake thoroughly scolds Vila and then, when Vila leaps to implicate Avon in the crime, scolds Jenna. Jenna crosses Avon’s arms across his chest and scowls across the room at Avon, who puts up her feet and smirks back. Another unforeseen bonus: evading Blake’s recriminations even when Blake is determined to make them. It is a small comfort since as soon as they find themselves alone again, he is forced to endure her own version of the scolding. It has all the fiery righteousness of Blake’s speech, as well as the barbs from Jenna’s stung pride at having to bear it in the first place.  Worst of all, the whole tiresome diatribe is being directed at him through his own mouth.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Avon tells her stiffly, and mentally retracts his earlier conclusion. There is _no_ advantage to this. 

She shakes his head, hands propped up on his hips, and leaves.

He continues to search for some idea, some sign, some anomaly that might have triggered their switch. He estimates a wide time period which he inputs it into the computer so it can search for possible external and internal influences, but the computer finds nothing. The fact that there is no scientific basis for what’s happened doesn’t make research any easier—he doesn’t have even a clue of where to start. They hadn’t passed any mysterious planets while he’d slept, nor had they passed any spacecraft that might have put out some odd signal. The most unusual thing to have happened in the past thirty hours was his team-up with Vila to re-programme the food synthesisers. But Jenna hadn’t been involved, and of Vila, Avon himself and Gan, only Avon seems to be afflicted, so that doesn't seem a likely cause.

He pauses to consider the possibility that Vila and Gan might have been switched, and then just as quickly dismisses it. Vila is unmistakeable, and there is no one so thoroughly himself as Gan. Those two would find attempting to mimic each other impossible.

People wander in and out. He and Jenna put their heads together for several hours, but if anyone notices that they’re spending more time together than is normal, no one comments. Somewhere in a quiet moment Avon finds himself alone on the flight deck. He checks briefly down both corridors to make sure no one is on their way to join him, then turns to face the viewscreen.

“Zen.”

“Here,” comes Zen’s stately voice.

“Identify me,” he orders.

The yellow lights Zen uses as visual reference points flash briefly before he answers, “Insufficient data for conclusive identification.”

“Explain.”

“Physical data asserts you are Jenna Stannis. However,” Zen continues, “voice recognition systems suggest that you are _not_ Jenna Stannis.”

“Do voice recognition systems suggest an alternate identity?”

Zen thinks a bit longer.

“Voice cadence, sentence structure and word usage suggest you are Kerr Avon.”

“Justify.”

“Logic circuits dictate there is no justification for this anomaly.”

“Wonderful,” Avon mutters, tapping his knuckles against the back of the couch. He doesn’t tell Zen to keep the anomaly to himself. Without a direct question from someone, Zen oughtn’t to volunteer the information. And with any luck—though luck seems, recently, to have flown Avon’s side—no one will have any reason to ask.

They survive the day through and leave shift that evening at the same time—‘Avon’ because his shift has officially ended and ‘Jenna’ because Avon reminds Blake of the stomach pains and lack of sleep the night before and cries off early. He tries to be rueful and charming and girlish and friendly but he’s at his breaking point and can’t be bothered to try very hard. Blake tells him to feel better and he nods, belatedly remembers to thank him, and follows Jenna out.

He catches up to her at a junction where she’s obviously waiting for him; left to her cabin, right to his. They stare at each other for a moment. He isn’t used to Jenna standing taller than him, which is an absurd thing to think, really, in light of the fact that he isn’t used to Jenna being _him._

“Right,” she says.

He’s not sure what she’s thinking, but he’d be willing to bet her thoughts are running along the same track as his. All day he’s searched for some kind of palatable excuse to get them into closer long-term proximity to each other. Moving into the same room would be optimal for ease and privacy, but he knows full well how that would look to the rest of _Liberator’s_ crew. And he is not willing to go that far, for reasons not entirely clear-cut in his mind, but strong nonetheless.

“Right,” he echoes.

“I’ll help you with your hair tomorrow morning,” she offers.

“Thank you,” he answers gravely, and with that they both go their separate ways: he to the left, she to the right.

He shuts the door to her cabin behind him, leans back against it, and at last allows himself to acknowledge the panicked whirlwind of thoughts cluttering his normally organised brain. It is absolute insanity: beyond ridiculous, beyond ludicrous. And every now and again his scientific mind begins to whisper that he’s found himself in a remarkable situation, one which he should take every advantage of, and that makes it twenty times worse. Surely everyone has wondered, at some point or another, what it might be like to live as a different person. All the answers are literally at his fingertips, but this is not some lab-controlled experiment or miraculous sex-shift. This is not a body built to house his mind and it is not his body in female form, this is the body of one of his companions, a woman he respects possibly beyond anyone else on board _Liberator_. And so he can allow himself to do nothing but concentrate, every second, on not remembering how each of them is now far more intimate with the other than either would like. He can feel the strain of it knotting his shoulders and pulling behind his eyes.

He wonders how Jenna is managing. He wishes he were back in his own body. He wishes his thoughts would stop racing. He wishes he had some idea of what on earth he should do next.

He grasps at that last like a lifeline. The orderly, logical, and only thing he can do is to take the situation one step at a time. Right now he needs to remove Jenna’s clothes, wash up for the evening, and get into bed. A good night’s sleep is an absolute necessity; exhaustion will make the stress worse.

He pushes off the door and heads for her washroom. He scrubs his face with soap until the foam almost fills the small sink and her cheeks are bright pink when he looks in the mirror. It seems to take hours to get the mascara off; he works at it meticulously until the task is complete. Her face in the mirror, clean of make-up at last, is surprisingly young, and he wonders for the first time how old she is. It hadn’t seemed relevant before now.

He cleans his teeth and dries his face, blanks his mind entirely and uses the toilet—something he’d managed to get through the entire day so far without doing—and heads back into the bedroom. He sits on her bed to remove her shoes and socks, and accustomed to heels or not, he feels the tingles of relief in the arches of her feet when he stands back up without them. He drops them neatly at the foot of the bed, removes her clothes and chucks them into the processor, and then pulls open her closet door. There he freezes, staring into the floor-to-ceiling mirrored wall that makes up the back of her closet.

He’s never paid much attention to Jenna’s looks, apart from noting when they’d first met that she was a very beautiful woman. He’d dismissed it immediately as unimportant; he’s always been more interested in her competence and her potential for moral ambiguity than either her beauty or her sexuality. But it’s a little hard to miss, now, when he’s being confronted so completely with her nude body.

The realisation that the sight will most certainly do something for his brain, and that his brain will in turn send signals of arousal to her body, finally snaps him out of his daze. He tears his eyes away and glances to his left. The silvery nightdress he’d found himself wearing the night before hangs on a hook in the closet; Jenna must have put it away while he’d showered that morning. He removes it and drops it over his head. It slithers down over his skin and Avon shivers. He is a sensual man, and Jenna’s body is nothing if not sensual. He thinks again of his shower that morning, and of Jenna’s offer to join him and the result he'd known would follow if he accepted, and he thinks of Blake’s hand on his arm, the way his fingers had tightened gently for a moment before falling away. He remembers the heightened way he’d felt it, even through the cloth of her blouse, and wonders whether Jenna’s body could be attracted to Blake on its own, even when Avon’s mind is controlling it. Or perhaps it had been a product of Avon’s own surprise, unused as he is to touch he hasn’t initiated. Or perhaps—

He grimaces, realising he’s running fingertips thoughtlessly over Jenna’s forearm, and goes to bed.


	2. The Guns

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Fake Science and Lots of Action.

“Riibus 4,” Blake says, hands on hips as he watches the small orange planet spin slowly on the screen. “Available information, please, Zen.”

They sit in their customary places the next day, having been called to the flight deck by their intrepid leader, no doubt to learn the details of yet another of his hair-brained schemes. Avon doesn’t mind the view from the central seat, although he’s having to fight to keep from sitting back in Jenna’s chair, crossing his arms over his chest, and glowering. It’s his usual reaction to the news that Blake’s planning yet another game of roulette with their lives on the line, but it isn’t Jenna’s. Meanwhile, conversely, Jenna keeps leaning forward as if for a better view, a look of engaged concentration on her face which she wipes hurriedly away when she realises she’s slipping up. Avon shakes his head to himself. The two of them would be comic, if their situation made him feel at all like laughing.

“It is a small planet,” Zen states, “with a seven hour day and a one hundred and twenty-one day year. Earth-like gravity; atmosphere is breathable, if thin.”

“Inhabited?” Jenna asks, and then immediately shoots a wry look at him. He grimaces back—it is a question much better suited to Jenna than to Avon, and therefore Avon should have asked it. He wishes for a moment that they could have been made conveniently telepathic when they’d had their bodies switched. It would have made it so much easier for the right person to say the right thing.

“Negative,” Zen answers. “Temperatures are too extreme to sustain human or varied plant life for long periods. There are no bodies of liquid water, though there are polar ice caps. It may have been a green planet once, several millennia ago.”

“And what’s it got to do with us?” Avon asks Blake, and then worries whether it might have come out too harshly.

Blake turns to him briefly with a twinkle in his eye. “It holds a Federation weapons cache for the outer planets here.”

Avon opens his mouth and then closes it abruptly and sends Jenna a look. She nods minutely, then settles back into the cushions behind her as he’s been longing to do, and lets a small smile tug at the corner of his mouth. “And let me guess,” she says, in a reasonable imitation of his own waspish drawl, “we’ll be looting it? Another blow for freedom? Or at least for simple theft.”

Conversational flow would dictate that Jenna then jump in with a counter-argument, something pro-rebellion and in support of Blake’s ideas—no matter how suicidal. Unfortunately Avon is so very strongly in agreement with her impression of his thoughts, he can’t think of any way to argue with them. He crosses his arms instead and hopes Blake will eventually say something he can support in a general way, and concedes that Jenna may be a better actor than he. Though perhaps it is simply easier to be Avon. The thought holds some shade of hubris, but he’s willing to consider it true nonetheless.

 _I am Jenna,_ he tells himself firmly. _I am starry-eyed in love with Blake. I agree with every one of Blake’s hare-brained ideas. I’d follow Blake anywhere and sacrifice anything, including my good sense._ Avon repeats it to himself like a mantra. Right, it’s not a problem. He can manage this.

“And we’re taking the weapons with us?” Gan is asking.

“Yes, we’ll load as many onto _Liberator_ as she can carry.”

Avon’s calming mantra cuts off abruptly. These people are taking years off his life. “And then?”

“We distribute them.”

“Distribute?” Jenna asks quickly. “What, like alms to the poor? Come on, Blake.”

It is definitely easier to be Avon, Avon decides. Being the voice of reason has never been so appealing as it is now. He starts back in on his mantra.

Blake doesn’t waver. “I’ve been in contact with the leaders of several resistance groups, on Kerigan, Alphus Prime and Earth. They can use all the help they can get, and armed, they can do a lot more damage to the Federation.”

“At least tell me we’ll be selling the guns to them?” Vila asks.

“Of course not!” Cally jumps in, looking offended at the very idea.

“Not even the hope of a profit at the end of it all,” Vila says mournfully.

“The only profit will be our continued existence,” Jenna snarks. “If we’re lucky.”

“Blake’s right,” Avon jumps in. The sentence shocks his brain blank for a moment before he pulls himself back together. “And it’s hardly as though carrying weapons makes our existence any more or less risky.”

“And divvying them up between not one, not two, but three Federation-run planets?” Jenna fires back, looking less as if she’s arguing and more as if she’s playing a diverting game. Avon hopes Blake can’t see her expression from where he’s standing.

“We take bigger risks all the time,” he tells her flatly. “And better to hand off the guns than to use them ourselves. Wouldn’t you think, Avon?” he adds at the last minute.

“I suppose,” Jenna answers. Her eyes are still dancing. He shakes his head.

“How do we get the weapons, then?” he asks, turning back to Blake who’s been watching them argue with good-natured patience. “Snatch-and-run job?”

“We blow up the base.”

Avon very seriously considers strangling Blake. With disappointment he concludes that, sitting in Jenna’s chair as he is, he’s too far away to leap his feet and carry out the deed without sacrificing the element of surprise.

 

~*~

 

From the little he can see, Avon doesn’t think much of Shorr Carn. He’s a large man with a large laugh, and he has a large greying-brown beard which he uses to mask his expression and a large voice which he uses to mask his intentions. Avon doesn’t trust him one bit, but as he’s stuck aboard _Liberator_ and can rely only on Zen, who has tapped into Carn’s surveillance cameras, there’s not much to be done about it. Jenna, standing to one side of Blake, spends the entire meeting with Avon’s hand on his gun. Avon notes and approves of it; Carn notes and then ignores it, and Avon’s not sure whether that’s a good sign or a bad one. Gan, standing to Blake’s other side, spends the entire meeting with his arms crossed over his chest. It is not an optimal position for either attack or defence, but it is intimidating without being overtly hostile.

 _Liberator_ is not without her own laboratory and basic weapons-development systems, but Blake had insisted on getting more technical bombs from an outside source. Hence, Shorr Carn. He is a mercenary of unsavoury repute, but Blake had insisted. For one thing, he is said to have a great love of pyrotechnics and no great love of the Federation, and these seem to have earned him Blake’s approval, if not his admiration. He’d told Avon and Cally flatly, when they’d reached the agreed-upon rendezvous point, that they weren’t invited to attend the meeting. Carn, Blake explained with delicacy, was aggressively fond of women.

“I don’t trust him,” Avon says, drumming his fingers against the main drive control panel.

“I think you’re right not to,” Cally answers from her own seat. “He isn’t easy to read, particularly from this distance. But what I can pick up, coupled with his reputation, make me disinclined to like him.”

“Yes,” Avon says, as something occurs to him. “Yes, quite.” He turns to her. Cally’s a telepath. She can’t read minds, but she can pick up a sort of general, hazy impression if she tries. Has she tried? He doesn’t know why he didn’t think of it before. “Cally,” he asks. “I had a…a sort of an odd feeling sometime during the night before last. Did you notice anything during that time? Anything strange?”

She blinks at him. “No. What sort of strange?”

“I don’t know. I checked the computers but I couldn’t find anything that might have explained the feeling. Avon said he felt it too,” he adds, and waits to see how she’ll react.

“And he couldn’t find any cause either?” Her face is innocently blank. She doesn’t know. It is a small comfort, but a comfort all the same.

“No."  He turns back to the screen. He watches Carn gesture, and four of his men carry forward two boxes and set them on the floor between the two parties. Gan takes one of them with ease, Blake and Jenna each take a handle of the other. Jenna hands over a small pouch, which Carn inspects thoroughly before nodding and throwing Blake an ironic salute. Blake nods and raises his bracelet to his lips.

“ _Vila_ ,” comes his voice over _Liberator’s_ speakers. “ _Ready for teleport_.” The three of them disappear, leaving behind only a brief white glow where they’d stood moments before; then that too vanishes.

“Zen, terminate your link with Carn’s ship and get us out of here,” Avon orders. “Heading is Riibus 4.”

“Affirmative,” Zen says, and Cally and Avon hurry out of the room to find Blake.

“He was a piece of work,” Jenna’s telling Vila when they arrive. She looks up as they clatter down the steps into the teleport room. “I’m glad you two weren’t there.”

“Why Avon, I’d almost think you cared,” Avon says, and watches her catch herself. Carn must have been nasty to throw her that badly off her game.

“Avon’s right,” Blake says, and ignores the way Jenna widens Avon’s eyes and places a hand against his heart with mock astonishment. “Come on, let’s get this stuff out of the way.” Gan retrieves his box and Blake takes his side of the other, with Vila and Cally rushing to help him.

Avon steps over to Jenna’s side. “A little overly dramatic, don’t you think?” he asks quietly.

“You know,” Jenna threatens, “I might take this opportunity to soften your edges up a bit. You could be a nicer person—you’ve left yourself ample room for it.”

“Do it,” Avon snarls, “and you’ll find your own reception when we get back to our right bodies less pleasant than you hope.”

 _“If_ we get back,” she replies, to which Avon can think of nothing to say.

 

~*~

 

Blake, Avon, Jenna, Cally and Gan handle the actual expedition, leaving Vila to handle the teleport system. Blake wants Vila down with them to get through any locked doors, but Vila insists that he is not a fan of explosions or dying, and points out that someone has to stay behind and that it should therefore be him.

“We could always blast our way in,” Avon suggests wryly. “We certainly have explosives enough to do it.”

Blake shakes his head. “We need to get in, set the charges, grab the guns and get out without anyone knowing we’re coming. Vila, I need you to open the doors.”

“Well what about just the front door?” Vila suggests. “And then I could hop back up here and keep a look out.”

Blake looks unimpressed and opens his mouth to no doubt order Vila into a more helpful frame of mind.

“I can teleport him down and back up, and switch places with him,” Gan says easily, and Vila nods in firm agreement. Blake looks to Jenna, who gives him an excellent impersonation of Avon’s eyebrow shrug. So Gan operates the teleport, and the air stills and the room vanishes into a white pinpoint, replaced a moment later by miles of thawing tundra. They turn until Cally sees a cluster of buildings in the distance, about a mile and a half away, and they take hold of the boxes of explosives and head toward it.

It’s mild and the air is clear and pleasant, although the peat is moist under their feet and Avon’s heels keep wobbling over patches of wet grass. He wishes he’d stopped to change into more reasonable boots. He’s used to practical clothing.

There is a patrol beating a large perimeter circle around the bunker.

“Now what?” Jenna asks as they crouch behind a scrubby shrub. The patrols are two strong: the usual faceless black-clad guards with guns. There is never enough space between pairs to leave them an opening which they could sneak through.

“Wait until nightfall?” Vila suggests. “Or, better yet—”

“A diversion of some kind, on the far side of the complex?” Avon says, before Vila can suggest they all just head back to the ship and take a never-ending holiday from heroics.

“An explosion?” Cally asks.

“No.” Blake shakes his head. “Too noisy. A puzzle, I think, rather than an attack.”

“A high-volume distress beacon, hidden under a shrub?” Avon offers.

“Crude, but effective,” Jenna replies on cue, and leans down to murmur into her bracelet, “Gan, teleport me up.” The thin white line appears around Avon’s body, and she vanishes.

It is a good ten minutes before she reappears, during which time Vila’s begun regaling them with all the horrible things his mind supposes might have happened, and Blake’s started chewing on the tip of his thumb. Avon catches himself watching and turns to watch the patrols instead. There is a slight shimmer and the air around them hums briefly, and then Jenna crouches down with them again. “Distress beacon planted,” she says. “Let’s see if it works.”

It does. The current patrol and the next pass their hiding place, but the third does not replace them. “Go, now!” Blake whispers, and they grab the boxes and run awkwardly across the tundra toward the bunker. The boxes are heavy and the bunker is at least three hundred yards away, but they reach it, press themselves into the thin shelter the entrance provides, and Vila gets started on the lock, all without incident.

“Vila!” Blake hisses, nervous and impatient despite their success. Vila wipes a hand across his forehead, and it comes away sweaty.

“This’ll make me grey before my time,” he murmurs, fiddling with the controls on his lock pick.

“Should have thought of that before going into this line of work, shouldn’t you?” Blake answers. The lock beeps and a red light above the door goes sky blue.

“I’ve done it!” Vila cries, and all four of them shush him as one. “Sorry,” he whispers. “Gan, teleport me up!” He vanishes and twenty seconds later, Gan appears in his spot.

He grins at them.“Any problems?”

Blake grins back, and Avon’s stomach turns over at the sight. He rolls his eyes, not quite knowing what the problem is but fairly sure it’s nerves.

“Shall we move the party inside?” he suggests.

Blake looks at him in surprise. “Worried, Jenna?” he asks, and Avon curses himself for letting that come out.

Jenna comes to his rescue with an even drier tone. “She’s perfectly right; you two are celebrating before we’ve even begun to get started on this mad project.”

Blake looks back to Avon, and Avon offers him a wry smile. “I confess I am a little worried,” he says. “I’d feel better if we were out of the open. That distress beacon won’t keep them occupied forever.”

“Fair enough,” Blake says. “Come on, Cally, help me with this one.”

They troupe in, dragging the charges along with them. It’s surprisingly dark inside: the bunker is entirely concrete, lit only by sporadically placed, naked, old-fashioned light bulbs. Empty corridors stretch off straight ahead and to their left and right. The place must be incredibly old. Cally and Jenna take a few steps down the corridors and check the ceilings for cameras before returning and declaring the all clear. Blake activates the door behind them and it slides soundlessly shut.

“All right,” he says, and his voice echoes in the empty bunker. “According to Zen’s information, there are four weapons caches, placed at equidistant points around a central communication room. We haven’t the time or the manpower to hit all four. Cally, you and Gan take one box and head down that way; find the first cache, set the charges halfway beyond it and then start loading up the guns.”

“Why not set the charges in the two far caches and clear out the two near?” Cally asks.

“We haven’t the time. The charges have a fifteen minute timer, and this place is large enough that if we set them at the far ends, we won’t have make it back, load the guns and get out before they blow.”

“Why not simply alter the charges to give us more time?” Avon asks.

“This is a destruction mission with a bit of thievery on the side,” Blake answers. “I’m not going for maximum efficiency.  I don’t particularly care what we destroy as long as it’s something.”

 _Elegant as ever_ , Avon thinks, but manages not to say it.

Cally nods. “All right.”

“Good. Avon, you head down this central corridor and check out the communications room. See if there’s any useful information readily available, then then join Cally and Gan. Jenna, you’re with me; we’ll take the other set of charges down this way. Questions?”

They shake their heads and split up. The others’ footsteps fade until Avon and Blake are left with only their own shuffling steps and laboured breathing. The box is absurdly heavy, and Avon’s shorter than Blake, his arms aren’t as strong, and he’s wearing four inch heels. Blake’s having to carry more of the weight, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

“Sorry I snapped,” Avon says, taking a stab at that wry, self-effacing tone only Jenna can manage, and which charms even him at times. Blake sends him a brief, humour-filled smile. It makes the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkle, and it makes him look older and younger at the same time. Avon finds himself grinning back.

 

~*~

 

The weapons cache is laid out with stark, utilitarian efficiency. “I’ll take these up further and set them,” Blake tells him. “Start loading up; I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Avon nods and drags a box out from underneath a solid-looking table. He pulls out the casing and drops it into a corner; they’ll fit more in without it, and he doesn’t particularly care if the guns get knocked about a bit in their journey back to _Liberator_.

He’s gotten three boxes loaded when a distant boom makes the walls and gun racks tremble. He stops and heads for the door. Blake isn’t back yet, and the charges should be nowhere near going off. He pokes his head carefully out to see Blake charging down the corridor toward him. There’s another distant explosion, and the tremble this time is slightly more pronounced.

Blake darts through the door, and Avon takes a quick moment to make sure no one’s coming after him, before ducking back in as well. “What happened?”

“I have no idea—charges aren’t supposed to go off for another ten minutes,” Blake gasps. He starts throwing guns into an empty box. Another explosion sounds in the not-so-distance.

Avon hurries to help him. “Why are they going off one at a time?” He asks.

“They're set along the powerline; the charge passes from bomb to bomb and takes down most of this half.”

“Clever,” Avon tells him and the floor shakes along with the walls. “Maybe too clever. How close is the charge nearest to us?”

“Close enough to set this place off. These are old projectile weapons, with gunpowder.”

“A particularly incendiary material,” Avon comments. The next explosion is much closer and the whole room shakes.

“Drag these out of here!” Blake cries. “If any of this is set off with us in here—”

Avon doesn’t need to be told they’ll be blown sky-high. He takes the handle of the nearest box and drags it toward the door and down the corridor with a strength he had no idea Jenna was capable of. He leaves it as soon as he decides it’s a safe distance from the room and heads back.

He finds Blake loading yet more guns. “What are you doing?” he yells. “We’ve got as much as we’re going to get, Blake!”

“Keep moving them out,” is Blake’s only reply. Avon rolls his eyes and starts on another box.

This time on his way back in, he passes Blake on the way out. He leaps nimbly over the box he’s dragging and heads back in for the remaining two. There’s no way they’ll get them both out. The explosions are growing closer by the second and the walls are shuddering around them with each one. Dust sifts out of the ceiling and falls into his eyes. He starts on the penultimate box, consigning the last one to its doom.

He’s at first shocked, and then appalled when Blake leaps over his box and continues back toward the cache.

“No, Blake! There’s no time! Stubborn fool,” he mutters, abandoning his box and heading after him. He meets Blake’s back at the door as the man stubbornly drags out the last load. He gets round the other side and picks it up and between them they manage three yards before the room behind them explodes.

“Blake, get down!” Avon yells, or tries to, and throws himself at his companion, knocking them both to the ground. He squeezes his eyes shut and hopes they’re far enough from the fire that the last box doesn’t go up in flames too. A large piece of concrete falls loose from the ceiling and lands a few feet from their legs, and then everything goes quiet.

“Jenna? Jenna!”

Avon opens his eyes.  “That was close,” he says.

“What were you thinking?” Blake shouts. “You could have been killed!”

“You usually—” Avon coughs into the settling dust and rephrases, hoping Blake doesn’t notice his stumble. “You never take Avon to task when he leaps to the rescue,” he accuses. He pushes himself off Blake and rolls away.

“That’s different,” Blake answers, but his eyes drop shiftily to the side.

“Oh?” Avon challenges, interested. “How?”

Blake sighs. “I’m sorry, Jenna. I know you’re capable, and I trust you more than anyone, you know that. I was only worried.”

Avon snorts and gets to his feet, reaching down to brush the dust off Jenna’s plush purple trousers. He extends his reach awkwardly as it occurs to him that Jenna would probably offer Blake a hand up, though certainly Avon would not. He and Blake have a very clear agreement about these sorts of things: whenever Avon leaps on Blake in order to save his life in a fit of temporary insanity, they both then staunchly ignore that it has ever happened.

Now, though, Blake takes Jenna’s hand with a smile and not the slightest sign of awkwardness, and lets Avon pull him to his feet.

“Thanks,” he says, and retrieves his hand to lift his bracelet to his mouth. “Blake,” he says, and Avon rubs at his palm thoughtlessly. His fingers are tingling a little. Blake has a firm grip.

“ _Cally_ ,” comes her voice over the communicator.

“Our charges went off early,” Blake tells her.

“ _Ours too_.”

“Everyone all right?”

“ _We’re fine, though Gan and Avon will need medical attention; the wall collapsed half on top of them_.”

Avon looks up at that but doesn’t say anything, busy as he is dragging the last box to join their collection further down the hall. Blake follows him.

“Did you get the guns?”

“ _Yes, they’re here. One set lost in the explosion but the rest are all accounted for_.”

“Good. Everyone grab a box. Vila, teleport us up.”

“ _Right, right, just a minute…_ ”

Avon brings his own communicator up to his mouth. “Now, Vila,” he snaps, ignoring the look Blake throws his way. He wants to get off this planet and back to check on his body and he is in no mood to wait patiently while Vila blunders around.

“ _All right, calm down!_ ”

“Avon’s rubbing off on you,” Blake says, taking a handle in each hand.

“I’m worried,” Avon answers, manoeuvring the boxes until he can wrap one hand around two handles at once. “There are only two reasons I can think of for those charges to go off early, and I don’t like either of them.”

Blake nods. “Either the charges were rigged, or?”

“Or someone has a signal to set them off remotely, and is in within range to use it.” Avon takes hold of the last box. Blake nods again, looking thoughtful, but doesn’t answer.

A moment later that sensation of being frozen in time washes over them and the pile of rubble they’ve been standing on is sucked away into a distant white pin point. The space around it is filled by _Liberator’s_ teleport room. They clear the teleport pad so Vila can bring up the others.

He and Blake are coated in white masonry dust, but Cally’s group has suffered more extended damage. Gan has a long gash on his forehead and is leaning dizzily on Jenna, who has one shoulder tucked under him to support his weight. Her other shoulder is being held tightly by Cally, and Avon sees why when she shifts her grip and her hand slides in the blood that’s run down his arm and coated his torn sleeve. He’d been fond of that tunic, too. He wonders if _Liberator’s_ machines can repair it, or if it’s a hopeless cause.

“Avon’s lost a lot of blood,” Cally says quickly, “Vila, get the medical kit. I don’t want to move either of them further than we have to. Gan may have a concussion.”

“What happened?” Blake asks quickly, sliding his own shoulder under Gan’s other side and helping him to sit.

Avon steps forward in time to hear Jenna mutter, through gritted teeth, “It’s not that bad.”

“Gan was going for the last crate when the charges blew,” Cally says. “I’d placed them far enough down the tunnel, I thought, but the entire place started to fall apart. Avon went to pull Gan back and half the wall fell on them.”

Vila returns with Cally’s small medical kit. He swallows as Cally and Avon lower Jenna to the ground. “I don’t like blood,” Vila murmurs.

“What a surprise,” Avon snaps. “Make yourself useful and get over it.”

“That’s not very nice!” he says, sounding hurt. He crouches down and pushes the box their way and Cally begins to rummage through it for supplies. Avon ignores him and leans forward to study the damage to his arm. He’ll feel remorse for snapping at Vila later, if he finds himself without anything better to do.

“You’ll be all right,” Jenna whispers to him. “It’s not bad.”

“If you’re saying things like that, you’re more than half out of it already,” he points out, trying to make it sound like a joke but giving her a significant look.

She bites his lip and looks away.  “Sorry, just woozy.”

“Perhaps you should try not to talk,” he suggests, though he’s aware that by this point they’re both so out of character that it’s only the general flurry of activity and muted panic that’s saving them from a lot of confused looks.

 

~*~

 

They’ve just mended Jenna’s arm with the tissue regenerator, and Cally’s settled Gan in the surgery. She’s pumped him full of antibiotics and is starting in on a brain scan when something hits them hard enough to send each of them flying off their feet.

“What the hell was that?” Avon says, shoving himself onto his elbows. Blake is already on his way out of the room, and Avon gets to his feet and heads after him, wobbling on the cursed high heels. If they don’t figure this out and reverse it soon, he’s going to turn an ankle, no matter how used Jenna’s body is to wearing them.

“Zen!” he yells as they reach the flight deck.

“Sensors indicate _Liberator_ is under attack.”

“You astonish us, you idiotic computer!” Avon snaps. “Any chance of finding out who is out to kill us this time?”

“Sensors indicate it is _the Susan_ ,” Zen replies calmly, and Blake and Avon stare at one another, confused.

“The what?” Blake asks.

Zen clarifies, “The ship captained by the one known as Shorr Carn.”

“Oh wonderful,” Blake says, running a hand through his curls. “Well, I think we can safely guess that the premature explosives were something to do with him, in light of this.”

Avon nods, and Jenna runs into the room as another blast hits them.

“Zen, put up the shields!” she orders. Vila stumbles in behind her.

“Crew to battle stations,” Blake barks, and Avon heads toward Jenna’s chair only to be knocked off his feet into Blake’s arms as a third blast hits. Blake stumbles and they land in a tangle on the end of the couch.

“Orbit lost,” Zen tells them calmly. Avon pushes himself to his feet and promptly falls over backward onto the floor as the ship begins to shake. “ _Liberator_ is falling toward the planet.”

“Controls to full automatic.” Jenna takes her customary position and Avon, sprawled on his backside on the floor, takes a brief moment to admire the picture of himself in that chair.

“Zen, re-establish orbit!” Blake manages, trying to push himself up to sitting and failing as the ship tilts crazily before the gravity simulators can compensate. Avon goes rolling away from him toward the viewscreen, and yelps when his head slaps against the edge of something hard.

“Planetary orbit will be established in one minute, thirty seconds.”

“Will you two stop fooling around and get up here and help?” Jenna yells, and manages to sound _exactly_ like Avon.

“Oh, bravo,” he says. He’d applaud, if this were at all the right moment.

“We’re _trying!”_ Blake shouts back childishly. Avon manages to gain his feet at last and, clutching his head, makes his way toward the pilot’s chair.

“How badly are you hurt?” Jenna asks him.

“It isn’t bad,” Avon answers, and watches a ghost of a smile cross his face.

“You shouldn’t pilot anyway,” she says. “Not with a head injury. I can manage—take my chair and just do as I tell you."

Avon grins back at her and wonders if he hit his head harder than he’d thought. It is an excellent move on her part, either way, and worthy of congratulations.

“Should I worry you’re trying to steal my job?” he asks lightly.

“You should worry that we’re in the middle of someone trying to kill us,” Vila reminds them. “Zen, get me a fix on their ship so I can blast the hell out of them.”

 _Liberator_ shakes around them again. Blake gets to his feet and staggers to Vila’s side, clutching at his station console for balance. “I think I’ve already had enough of this for one day,” he mutters.

“We’ve got shields up and we’re not taking any damage,” Jenna says. “They can’t destroy us; why are they still firing?”

“Sheer idiotic bloody-mindedness?” Avon suggests.

“Orbit re-establishment disrupted,” comes Zen’s voice. “New orbit will be established in two and a half minutes.”

They stare at each other. “They’re pushing us into the planet,” Vila says, hollowly.

“If we hit the atmosphere without control we’ll be pulled apart,” Jenna says.

“Zen, can you get us a fix on the other ship?” Blake asks.

“Negative,” Zen replies.

“Forget the other ship,” Avon says. “Zen, take us down to the planet!”

“We can’t land _Liberator_ on a Federation planet!” Blake yells.

“Especially not one we’ve just looted and blown up!” Vila squeaks.

“We won’t survive up here,” Avon answers. “They’ve got the upper ground and the upper hand. Zen, take us down!”

“Confirmed. Planetfall will be achieved in four minutes, forty-two seconds.”

“Zen, put all power not required for the descent into the rear shields,” Jenna orders.

“Confirmed. Rear shields are at eighty-nine percent, and holding steady.”

“You know,” Blake says, voice conversational as the ship begins to rumble and the viewscreen blazes with fire, “this’ll be the first time we’ve landed _Liberator_ on solid ground.”

“Hooray for us,” Avon says drily. Blake shoots an amused glance his way.

“Or it would be,” Jenna says, and they all turn to look at her. She grins. “If we were actually going to land.”

Blake looks startled but Avon stares at her in horror, then leaps to his feet and heads to her side. “You can’t possibly—”

“Why not?” she asks cheerfully. “Zen, has _the Susan_ followed us into atmosphere?”

“Negative.”

She fixes him with a look. “It might work,” she murmurs.

“Might work? You’re as mad as Blake.”

“Careful.”

He stares back at her. “All right,” he says finally. “Give me the controls.”

“You can’t make this!” she hisses.

“If I don’t, the game is up,” he replies, and then louder, “Come on Avon, if either one of us can do this, it’s me, headache or no.”

Jenna slides smoothly out of the chair and he takes her place. She makes sure she’s standing between him and Blake, and mutters, “I’ll tell you what to do.”

“I know how to fly.”

“Ever done a manoeuvre like this?”

Avon scowls.

“I thought not.” She raises her voice. “Zen, give us full forward projection.”

“Confirmed.”

“When we are three miles from the surface of Riibus 4,” Avon adds, “switch to manual navigation. Keep the computers online to compensate.”

“Confirmed.”

“What are you two doing?” Blake asks.

“Blowing up the planet a bit more before we go,” Jenna answers, and Avon grins as he watches the planet surface draw closer.

“ _Liberator_ is now three miles above planet surface. Manual navigation is confirmed.”

Avon continues the descent. “How close?” he asks Jenna softly.

“Half a mile.”

“You’re _joking.”_

“No.”

“I knew you were mad,” he mutters. “Zen, continue read out of our distance from the planet surface.”

“Three-quarters of a mile and descending. Five-eighths and descending. One-half and—”

“Now!”

“Zen, abort landing. Direct all power to the engine.”

“Landing manoeuvres aborted. All power is now directed to the engine.” Avon switches power to the forward thrusters and _Liberator_ blasts ahead at standard-by-two. Jenna reaches down and opens the secondary fuel tank.

“Faster,” she murmurs.

“She’ll pull apart.”

“She won’t. Increase speed until I tell you, then hold steady.”

Avon shakes his head but follows her instructions.

“Are we going to die?” he hears Vila ask, voice resigned.

“I hope not,” Blake answered. “If we do I’ll never forgive them.”

“There won’t be much of a problem, in that case,” Vila points out.

“Hold!” comes Jenna’s order, and Avon freezes, or tries to. The ship is shaking, blasting through the air at standard-by-five, and it’s difficult to keep his arms steady. The ground below them is nothing but a blur. The ground behind them will be nothing but charred rock.

“Jenna, are you sure about this?” Blake calls out.

“Positive,” Avon calls gaily back, and adds under his breath, “I’ve gone round the twist.” Jenna laughs breathlessly and he can feel himself joining in.

“On my count, pull up and head for the sky,” she says.

It’s like a dose of cold water. “We can’t take atmosphere at this trajectory! We’ll never break gravity.”

“You’ll need to pull very far up,” she admits.

He stares at her in horror.“You’ll kill us all.”

“She can take it. Three…two…one… _now_.”

Avon grits his teeth and pulls back and _Liberator_ shrieks as they curve up toward blue that turns to star-spangled black and then to fire. Jenna and Blake go tumbling off their feet and Avon can feel his stomach being sucked out of his body and through the floor back down to the planet. He’d be sick if he could; as it is he hears Vila scream and Blake yell his name. He wonders how Cally and Gan have been enjoying the ride. With any luck, they’ll still be alive at the end of it to let him know.

The fire vanishes as they reach space, and he gasps in a breath. In the next second the artificial gravity kicks in and his entire world shifts by ninety degrees. He _is_ sick then, but consoles himself with the sounds of the rest of them joining in.

“Level out,” Jenna croaks from somewhere behind him. “Level out and keep the planet between us and _the Susan._ ”

“Right,” he says, wiping sick off his mouth with the back of his hand. He levels out the ship, orders Zen back to full automatic control, and then tells Jenna fervently, “I am never, ever, listening to you again.”


	3. Planetfall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Possible warning? for a slimy evil creep being slimy and evil, and threatening non-con. Not that there is any non-con (no sex at all in this fic), but I think I'd rather over-warn than the opposite.

Gan’s condition, it turns out, has gone critical.  They find Cally, grey-faced, standing over him with an adrenaline administrator in one hand and the tissue regenerator in the other.  Gan’s skin is white and the blood on his face is jewel-red.

“Cally, sit down,” Avon says, rushing forward to take the tools out of her hands.  She relinquishes them willingly and collapses to the floor.  Jenna and Blake take over.  Vila hurries to Cally’s side with a cup of water.

“That felt like something chewed us up, digested us, and then spat us back out,” she says, taking the cup from Vila and downing the water in one go.  “What _happened_?”

“We had to take some irregular evasive manoeuvres,” he tells her.

“That’s one way of putting it,” Vila agrees.  “Personally, I think Cally’s description is a little more apt.”

“It’s certainly more colourful."  He listens to Blake’s voice and his own, weaving seamlessly together as he and Jenna fight to bring Gan back from the brink.  Avon shuts his eyes, exhausted, and slips an arm under Cally’s shoulder to lift her to her feet.  “Come on,” he says.  “There’s nothing more we can do here; they have it under control.  Vila, you stay in case they need something.”

Vila nods, and Avon slowly helps Cally out of the surgery. 

 

~*~

 

“We have a problem,” Jenna says.

Blake chuckles and it sounds thin and strained.  “If I had a penny for every time someone said that, I’d be a rich man.”

“It may have escaped your notice, but we _are_ rich men,” Vila points out.  “Or we could be, if you’d let us stop and enjoy it.”

Blake presses the tips of his fingers into his temples.  “What’s the problem, Avon?”

“The problem,” Jenna answers, “is that we used up quite a bit of fuel escaping your friend Carn.”

Blake nods.  “We’ll need to stop somewhere to refuel.”

“It’s not that simple,” Avon tells Blake, eyeing him.  The man looks dead on his feet.  Avon wonders if he’s rested at all since their earlier adventures.  “This ship is not a Federation ship, and so not built by Federation standards.  Cally and Avon have checked the remaining fuel supply.  It is not a fuel type any of us recognise.”

Blake stares at him for a very long moment, long enough to make Avon worried.  “What about Zen?” he asks at last.

“Zen has told us where we can find a supply,” Cally says.  “Unfortunately it’s on the far side of the galaxy.”

“And we’re on a tight schedule,” Blake agrees.  “Yes, this is a bit of a problem.  Can we complete our three drops, then get all the way to wherever this is, on what we have left?”

Cally nods slowly.  “It should be fine.  In space we fly exclusively on power, and the ship’s power is regenerational.  But there will be no room for another of the stunts we pulled on Riibus 4.  If we enter another planet’s atmosphere…we may not be able to get back out of it again.  Ever.”

Blake drops his face into his hands briefly.  “Well.  That’s some news,” he says.  “It’s never happened before now, of course, but I don’t like the idea that we can’t let it happen again.  Seems more dangerous, somehow.”

“That which is least desired is most likely,” Avon agrees.  “Blake, you need rest.”  Blake just waves a hand in his general direction, without looking up.  “ _Blake_.”

“All right,” he agrees.  “Zen, plot the fastest course from here to Kerigan.”

“The safest, surely?” Vila puts in.

“Perhaps a novel mixture of both?”  It comes out before he can stop it, and there is no passing it off as Jenna.  Vila and Cally frown at him.  Blake, however, just stands and heads out. 

“Zen, plot several courses and let Jenna choose.  I’ll be in my cabin.”

“Various course options are now available,” Zen says.  “Please specify which to implement.”

Avon stares at the empty corridor where Blake disappeared, and feels a headache building behind his eyes.  “I’m going to my cabin,” he says to Jenna.  “You choose.”

The light shining off the walls is almost blinding.  He turns down the corridor toward his own cabin automatically, then catches himself and reverses direction.

“I know you’re tired.”  Blake stands in his path, leaning against the wall and very obviously waiting for him.  “But we all are, you know.”  He’s wearing that kindly smile he only ever shows to Jenna, and steps forward to take her hand.  “If there’s something troubling you, I do wish you would tell me.  We’re friends, aren’t we?”

Jenna’s hands are smaller than Avon’s, and Blake’s hands are large, his fingers short and wide.  His hand had almost engulfed hers, when Avon had hoisted Blake to his feet in the tunnel on Riibus 4, and it engulfs it again now.  Avon remembers the way Jenna’s fingers tingled when Blake let go, and he wonders again whether it’s possible for a body to carry on an obsession, to expect and desire a sensation, even when the mind is not there to direct it. 

He wonders what Blake’s hand might feel like clasped in his own.

Avon takes a deep breath and tries for a smile.  “Of course.  I’m sorry; you’re right, I am just tired.  I haven’t felt myself recently.”

Blake sighs.  “Avon,” he says.

“What about him?”

Blake lifts his face and looks him dead in the eye.  “Avon.”

Avon’s heart slows down until it feels like the blood is moving through his veins with the speed of honey through snow.

“You know.”

“Of course.  Did you think I don’t know you two well enough to tell you apart?”

“No one else noticed.”

“They don’t know you as well as I do,” Blake says simply.

Avon can’t quite get a handle on the conversation.   “And just what is this great knowledge you fancy you have of me?”  His voice, and Blake’s, sound very far off.

“And they have noticed,” Blake continues, ignoring the question.  “They just haven’t figured it out.  Cally will soon.”

Avon realises Blake’s still holding his hand, and that he’d known whose hand he was holding all along, and he jerks away.  “Oh, very funny,” he snaps, rubbing his palm.  Blake lets his own hand drop back to his side.

“It wasn’t a joke.  I do think of you as a friend.”

Avon dismisses that as obviously ridiculous.  “How long have you known?” 

“I’ve suspected since the bunker on Riibus 4,” Blake tells him.  “I knew as soon as you and I reached the flight deck, after _the Susan_ fired on us.”

He’d had snapped at Zen, called it an idiotic computer.  No one is as annoyed by the ship’s computer as Avon is; he might as well have added, ‘Oh and by the way, I’m not really Jenna.’  Blake may behave foolishly every second of every day, but he’s not a fool. 

Avon leans carefully back against the wall.  “I knew I’d slipped up there.  But it seemed, at the time, to be the least of my worries.”

“May I ask you a question?”

“Can I stop you?”

“Probably.  Why didn’t you want us to know?”

Avon laughs.  “Really, Blake?  That is your question?  Out of all the things you could ask—and I would have thought ‘How did this happen?’ might be at the top of the list—that is what you choose to ask me?”

“I assume you don’t know what happened, or you’d already have found a solution.  And that’s what I want to know.  Will you tell me?”

Avon pushes himself back off the wall and starts down the corridor.  “It’s been a nightmare, Blake,” he says.  “The fewer people who knew, the better.”

“You won’t tell me.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” he says over his shoulder, and shuts Jenna’s cabin door behind him.

 

~*~

 

Their run on Kerigan is uneventful, if unpleasant.  They teleport down into a dark swamp with radioactive yellow lichen which drips from thin tree branches to slap against their cheeks and catch in their hair.

Gan and Cally are up ahead, hauling along the first box of guns between them, and out of earshot as they are, Avon takes the opportunity to share his opinion.  Speaking his mind has never felt so good.

“Are you sure the Federation’s on this planet?” Avon asks Blake.  “Morons they may be, but surely even they would not try to settle in this muck.”  His right heel sinks into a patch of particularly nasty mud, and the loud sucking noise that is made pulling it back out provides the perfect validation.

“The majority of the planet is much more habitable,” Blake tells him shortly.  “The resistance set up here because the Federation is so unlikely to come flush them out.”

“How true,” Avon grumbles.

The resistance fighters themselves are a stoic bunch, with faintly green-tinged faces and pale hair.  They take the guns and bustle them away in moments, and their leader shakes Blake’s hand very firmly.

“It is good to see you back, Roj,” he says.  Blake doesn’t answer, but he nods.

They’re back on _Liberator_ in record time.  Zen calculates their next route and they leave orbit only forty minutes after arriving.

In direct contrast to their experience on Kerigan, Alphus Prime is fabulously beautiful.  The air is crisp, the sun is bright, and they land in a field of flowers.  Tall purple mountains rise in the distance, capped with snow.

And, also in direct contrast to their experience on Kerigan, things don’t end up going quite as smoothly.

“Oh, let’s stay!” Vila says, dropping promptly onto his back in the grass and lying there spread-eagled.  Jenna nudges him with the toe of Avon’s boot and he swats at her half-heartedly.

“Even you wouldn’t be happy here once the Federation tripped over you,” Gan warns him.  He shades his eyes and turns in a slow circle.  “Where’s the rendezvous point, Blake?”

“There.”  Blake points toward a copse of purple-blue trees about six hundred yards away, and he and Gan head off, one box of their stolen cargo between them.

“Come on, Vila,” Avon says, as Jenna heads for the second box.

“You don’t need me,” Vila insists, without opening his eyes.  _Do we ever?_ Avon thinks, but doesn’t say it.  Too out of character.  Vila’s smiling contentedly, fingers brushing through the grass and feet wiggling.  “I’ll just lie here until you return.”

“With our luck,” Jenna says, as Avon shrugs and joins her, “he’ll be kidnapped by either Federation soldiers or barbaric natives.”

“Only,” Avon says, “if our luck is very good.”  He takes his half of the load and they set off after Blake and Gan.

 

~*~

 

Blake’s revolutionary friends on this planet are a much bigger and more diverse party.  They live in the forest at the base of the mountains, dress in a hodgepodge of ancient, patched clothing, and cook their food over primitive fires.  Avon stares around at the mess that is their campsite, unimpressed.  With their level of sophistication, this lot are likely to take the guns Blake gives them and shoot themselves in the feet.

“Don’t Federation soldiers see the smoke?” Blake asks Tarvan, their leader.  Tarvan, a thin, grizzled sort of man, shakes his head.

“Fuel here makes very little smoke.”

“That’s fortunate,” Blake says.  “It’s a nice set-up you’ve got.”  Which of course is high on the list of absurd things Blake has said in the time Avon’s known him, but it seems to please Tarvan.

“There’s a lot of cover amongst the trees,” one of his men agrees.  “And we’re never short of food.”

“Stay, and have some with us,” Tarvan offers.

“We left Vila in the field,” Avon murmurs in Blake’s ear.

“Thank you,” Blake says to Tarvan, “but we have to be going.  If our ship maintains orbit too much longer we’ll draw attention to you.”  He and Tarvan shake hands and they leave.

It is no surprise when they make their way back through the flowers and find Vila gone.  Blake begins searching around the Vila-shaped hole in the grass for signs of a struggle, and Jenna contacts Cally to ask if she’s teleported him back to the ship.  The answer, also unsurprising, is no.

“There are three sets of tracks,” Blake says, rejoining them, “apart from our own.  It’s impossible to tell which his could be.  We’ll have to split up.  Gan, take this trail; check in every few minutes on the communicators.”

Gan nods and starts off.  Watching him stride through the grass, Avon’s suddenly very aware of how exposed they all are out in this field of knee-high weeds and flowers.

Blake turns to Jenna.  “You two take the remaining trails.  If they branch off, I want you both in contact, every step of the way.”

“What about you?” Jenna asks.

“I’m going back to Tarvan to see if he knows anything.  At least he may be able to tell us something about the area, something that could help.”

“You don’t think that’s a little dangerous?” Avon asks frankly.  “Suppose Tarvan and his group were involved.”

Blake shakes his head.  “No, I don’t think so,” he says, and Avon fights the urge to grab his shoulders and shake him until his brains rattle in his head.

“Don’t blame me if you find yourself in a trap,” he snaps.

“Why not?” Blake snaps back.  “You were the one who left Vila on his own in the first place.”  He leaves and Avon, seething, starts off toward the mountains.  Jenna’s path is only six or seven feet from his and it heads generally the same direction, though it begins to angle away as they get closer to the trees.  They’re close enough to talk, but neither of them says a word until Blake’s voice rings out. 

“ _Blake.  I haven’t heard a peep from you.  Everyone still there?_ ”

“ _I’m here; all very quiet so far_ ,” comes Gan’s voice, and Avon and Jenna pause to report much the same thing.

“I dislike being scolded like a child,” Avon says, once he’s switched the communicator back off.  Jenna looks over at him.

“Even when we deserved it?”

“Especially then.”

They reach the edge of the forest around twenty feet from each other.

“We’re at the trees,” Jenna reports.  “Still no sign of Vila.”

“ _All right, keep each other in sight.  Gan?_ ”

“ _The field’s beginning to slope down. I’ve reached a sort of rocky outcropping and I can see a beach and an ocean.  It’s amazing.  The water is gold, and so bright my eyes hurt looking at it.”_

_“Any sign of Vila?”_

_“No, there’s nothing to be seen for miles, only flat beach.  No footprints anywhere in the sand; this may be a trail animals use to get down to the water.”_

_“Rejoin Jenna and Avon then.”_

_“Right, will do.”_

“I’ll wait for you,” Jenna says into her bracelet.  She hops onto a fallen tree and from there onto a mossy rock.  The vantage point gives her a good view into the forest and out the way they came.

“I’m going further in,” Avon tells her.  She nods.

“All right, but stay in sight though.”

He heads into the trees.  Sunlight glimmers down between the leaves, but it’s much darker—certainly darker than the spot Tarvan had chosen to make his camp.  Avon hadn’t had a bad feeling about the man, but life has taught him that gut instinct is unreliable.  People, in his experience, are more likely to betray you than not.

It’s harder to keep to the trail, now that it’s not clearly defined.  It wanders around trees and rocks and sometimes disappears entirely in the undergrowth.  He ducks to avoid a low-hanging indigo-leafed branch, steps over some silvery-green fungi, and finds himself staring at the point of a knife.

The hand wrapped around the other end of it belongs to Shorr Carn.

“Oh terrific,” Avon mutters.

“ _Gan!  Over here,”_ crackles Avon’s voice over the communicators.

“ _Ah, thanks Avon.  Where’s Jenna?”_

_“She’s—Jenna?  Jenna come in, I can’t see you.”_

Avon starts to reach for his bracelet and Carn says “ _Ah_ , ah, ah,” and a second later the knife’s at his throat.  Avon stumbles backwards into a tree.

 _“Jenna?”_ Jenna continues calling, and Avon spares a split second to roll mental eyes.  He considers calling out, but he can’t hear her voice through the forest, only through the communicator, and Carn and his knife are much closer to killing him than she and Gan are to mounting a rescue.

“Well, my _dear_ ,” Carn says.  His voice is dark and oily.  Avon decides he doesn’t care for it.  “My dear _Jenna_ , I presume?  I understand you are part of Blake’s crew—what a pity we didn’t meet before!”

“Oh?” Avon asks, eyeing the knife.  He’s forced to move his gaze back up to Carn’s as the man steps in, leaning nonchalantly against the tree on his forearm and trapping Avon between them.  The knife point comes to rest at his chest, between Jenna’s breasts. 

“Yes.  You are _quite_ lovely, Jenna.”

Avon tries to ignore it.  “Where’s Vila?”

“That whimpering creature?  He’s the least of your worries right now.”

“Have you killed him?”

“Why, Jenna!  You sound as if the thought doesn’t bother you at all.”  He presses closer.

Avon shrugs carefully.  In theory, and truthfully only when Avon’s feeling a bit ratty, ridding themselves of Vila somehow is a pleasant idea, complete with heavenly light and an angelic chorus.  Faced with the reality of it, Avon finds it makes him sick.  It also makes him want to knee Carn in the groin a few times.  It's not a move Avon considers beneath him, even when he _is_ _n't_ a woman.  Now he’s ready to take Carn’s knife and follow that act up with several unspeakable things which, under normal circumstances, he’d consider unthinkably inhumane.

Tempting though it is, it's obvious that if he tries anything the knife will end up shoved through his sternum.  He confines himself to happy fantasies and keeps very still.

Jenna has stopped calling for him on the communicator.  It’ll be because either they’ve given up, been captured, or have come looking and are on the verge of rescuing him.  That last seems, somehow, unlikely.

“As you say,” Avon says.  “Vila’s fate is the least of my worries.”  He sees movement out of the corner of his eye, and it takes everything he’s got not to turn his head toward it.  “But, it would make me a little more…relaxed?  If I knew he were all right.”

Carn grins, displaying very even if yellowing teeth.  His breath smells strongly of mint and faintly of rot. 

“Although not much,” Avon admits under his breath.  It _is_ Jenna; he can see her now, carefully moving from tree to tree to get behind the mercenary’s back.  Carn seems to be on his own—Avon just hopes it’s true, and that one of his men isn’t about to leap out and take her by surprise.  He could use a rescue.  He would _really_ appreciate one. 

Carn’s hand drops to stroke down his shoulder, and Avon twitches away before he can stop himself.  The knife presses forward, making a hole in Jenna’s shirt and piercing the skin beneath it.  Carn slides a knee between Avon’s legs and Avon’s hands clench into fists on their own.

Carn’s eyes drop blatantly down to his chest before coming back up.  “Quite lovely, Jenna.”

Avon hates the way he says Jenna’s name.  “I might believe you,” he murmurs, letting one hand wander back around the tree trunk, searching for a branch or something to hit him with.  “If it didn’t look like you were strongly considering killing me.”

“Don’t let that worry you.”  The rotten smell of his breath grows stronger the nearer he gets, and his beard is tickling Avon’s chin.  There is no convenient branch at hand.  “We can have a lot of fun together before we get to that.”

What a lucky thing, Avon thinks a little hysterically, that Blake had left him and Cally behind for his first meeting with Carn.  If ‘murdering rapist’ is the man’s usual style when it comes to women, they probably wouldn’t have gotten on nearly as well. 

Jenna, having made her way almost opposite Avon, steps carefully out into the small clearing and makes her way across.  Avon’s never realised how ridiculous he looks while he’s sneaking; it’s not a particularly happy discovery.  Perhaps Jenna simply does it wrong.

She’s about two feet away and preparing to pounce when a man blunders out of the bushes.

“Carn, this guy—hey, look out!” 

Carn turns.  Gan jumps out on the newcomer and flattens him, but it’s too late: Jenna’s lost the element of surprise.  Carn whips the knife away from Avon’s chest and slashes it at—well, Avon’s chest.  Jenna staggers back, just barely managing to avoid being sliced in two.  Avon grabs at him from behind, and Carn rushes backwards, smashing him into the tree.  When he steps forward again Avon can only slide to his knees, winded, and watch Jenna and Carn square off through tear-filled eyes as he tries to get his breath back.  On the other side of the clearing, Gan and Carn’s mercenary are grappling on the ground. 

Carn swings at Jenna and she grabs his hand deftly and twists it, but stumbles over a tree root just when it looks like she’s going to flip him onto his back.  He pulls away and gets his balance, but eyes her more warily.  The next attack goes over Jenna’s head but she darts under it, and they square off a third time.  Avon, clutching at his chest, realises he’s in a prime position to lend aid, and kicks out at Carn’s leg.  The mercenary’s arms wheel as he teeters, and Jenna moves in and hits him right across the jaw.  Carn falls like a stone.

“Well done,” Avon gasps, suitably impressed.  He’d no idea his body could move like that; when he fights he tends to include more desperate flailing.  She reaches a hand down and pulls him to his feet.  Gan’s sitting on his mercenary’s chest, elbows perched on his knees and chin perched on his hands as he watches them.

“You looked as if you had it under control,” he tells them cheerfully.

“Well,” Jenna replies, sounding breathless herself.  “I’ve always wanted the chance to punch someone in the face.”

Avon grins back at her.

 

~*~

 

Finding Vila is a bit of an anti-climax.  They meet Blake, who has rallied Tarvan’s men, and carry on to Carn’s camp, where they find his entire team of mercenaries sitting cross-legged on the ground in a semi-circle, watching avidly as Vila pulls a coin out of someone’s ear and then turns it into a delicately pink lizard. 

“Typical,” Blake mutters into Avon’s ear.  Jenna’s long hair stirs in his breath.

“He’s not got his bracelet on,” Avon answers, just as quietly.  “J—Avon, do you see it?”

“I’ll take a look,” Jenna answers, and he doesn’t watch as she sneaks away.  Knowing that Blake knows their secret has made him sloppy, but Gan doesn’t appear to have heard the slip.  In a few moments Jenna’s back.  “One of the men has it; he’s wearing it around his wrist.”

“If we can get Vila’s attention, maybe he can wrestle it off somehow,” Blake murmurs.  His index finger taps against his lips, and Avon tears his eyes away hurriedly. 

“Why not try waiving your arms in the air?” he suggests.

“That just might work,” Blake answers, and says into the communicator, “Cally, be ready to teleport on my command.”  Then he crouches and runs a few feet off to the left, keeping under the cover of some ferns until he’s in Vila’s direct line of sight.  He stands, waves his arms, and points to his bracelet.  Avon, amused despite himself, turns to Vila, interested to see how he’ll react.

Vila frowns in that way only he can, that way that makes him look like a child with a difficult maths exam, or a kicked puppy.  “Ah,” he says cleverly, and then repeats with more determination, “Ah.  Yes, for my next trick!  I will turn myself…invisible!”

There are oohs and ahhs and a few chuckles of disbelief from the group.  Avon reflects that Carn’s men are not the brightest in the universe. 

“I shall need some kind of focus…a piece of jewellery…”  Vila waves his fingers over his audience for a moment, as if honing in somehow on just the right thing.  “How about that shiny bracelet?  That would be perfect.  Thank you, good sir!”

“Sometimes I think Vila was made for the life of a street magician,” Jenna whispers to him.

“Obsequiousness and petty thievery being two of his greatest talents,” Avon agrees a little nastily, unable to get over the fact that Vila’s not tied hand and foot and languishing miserably in some hut.  It is the usual practice, when allowing yourself to be captured like an idiot by a group of idiots, to at least suffer for it.

She elbows him in the ribs, unimpressed by his mood.  “Whereas sneering condescension and _failed_ thievery are yours.”

“Excellent!” Vila says loudly, snapping the bracelet around his wrist.

“ _Cally, now!_ ” Blake hisses.

“And: behold!” Vila cries as the world freezes around them and they begin to teleport.

They all arrive together, Vila’s arms still lifted dramatically.  Avon feels his mouth twitch.

“As a magic trick,” he tells Vila, “that last works rather well.”

Vila grins.  “Pretty good, wasn’t I?”

“Blake,” Jenna asks.  “What about Tarvan and his men?  We just left them down there, on the edge of the mercenary camp.”

“Gan warned them,” Blake answers as he heads toward the stairs.  He sounds distracted.

“Don’t worry,” Gan says.  “They’d already started to move out.  They’ll be far away by the time that lot figure out Vila’s not actually reappearing.”

Avon heads after Blake.  “And what about Carn?” he asks.

Blake turns in the doorway and looks at him, and it is that cold, shuttered look that always makes Avon feel like anything at all in the universe could be about to happen, including their utter destruction.

“Tarvan said they had unfinished business,” Blake answers.  “I left Carn to him.”

“I see,” Avon says.  The look in Blake’s eyes, then, is the look that means he has made a moral call because it had to be done and he was the only one there to do it, though some part of him feels he did not have the right.  “Well,” he says, willing, on this occasion, to ease Blake’s conscience, “I for one will not complain if it turns out I am the last woman he will threaten to rape and kill.”

Blake’s eyes go soft with gratitude, and then they begin to twinkle.  “Let’s hope you were,” he says gravely, and Avon scowls as, behind him, Jenna begins to laugh.


	4. Across The Galaxy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story ignores the fact that 'Pressure Point' was very obviously their first trip back to Earth after leaving it on The London.

After the events of Alphus Prime, Blake insists on going down to Earth alone.  The others protest, citing reasons of practicality as well as safety—Blake cannot carry the two remaining boxes without some assistance—and he eventually agrees to let Gan come along.  Cally looks bored at being confined to operating the teleports yet again, but Blake tells her, pointedly, that he needs at least one level-headed person to remain on the ship.  Vila, arms across his chest, looks faintly embarrassed; Jenna scowls at Blake, and Avon ignores him.

Still, they stay to watch Blake and Gan haul the boxes over to the teleport pad and vanish in a white glow as Cally sets them down.

“Typical,” Vila says glumly.  He pushes off the edge of the teleport console and wanders out in the direction of the sitting rooms.  “Our first visit back to Earth in how long?  And we’re stuck up here while Blake and Gan get all the fun.”

“If you’d find it in yourself to rein in your fun every now and again, we might all benefit from it,” Cally says, standing and following.

“I didn’t ask to be kidnapped!  In fact I'll have you know I asked just the opposite, when I opened my eyes and saw them all standing over me…”

Avon shakes his head and leaves through the opposite door, making his way toward the flight deck.  He’s glad to be given some time off from heroics, even if Blake had intended it as a punishment and not a holiday.  He has plenty to do; figuring out and reversing whatever happened to him has been languishing at the top of his list, while they hop around the galaxy and strike convoluted blows for freedom.  Which is unfortunate, as passing out guns to resistance fighters like sweets to children would be very near the bottom, if Avon had his way.

“Zen,” he says, upon entering the empty flight deck.  “Status?”

“ _Liberator_ is holding stationary orbit above the planet Earth.”

“Any other ships on the scanner?”

“Negative.”

Avon heads for the couches and the computer console there,  and goes back once more through their flight records of a few days previous.  He finds nothing out of the ordinary, just as he had last time he’d checked.  No ships, planets, space stations, stars, meteor storms, nebulae, or unidentifiable objects had passed by them during the day or night watches—at least none that the ship had picked up on the scanners.  If there had been no external influences, he concludes, the cause must have been internal.

He pulls up _Liberator’s_ records for that time period, but again, there is nothing that seems likely to have had a hand in transferring his mind to Jenna’s body, and vice-versa.  The real question, he supposes, letting his head fall back on the couch, is what _would_ have been able to manage it?

Jenna finds him there twenty minutes later, feet stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankle, considering the philosophical possibility of personality transfusion and its theoretical mechanical requirements.

“Gotten anywhere?” she asks, settling on the back of the couch a few feet away.  She moves to cross her legs before wincing and hiking one knee up beside her instead.

Avon shrugs slightly.  “It seems to me the cause, or, at least, the mechanism, must have been electrical—when you consider the human brain and the way it functions.”  He looks up at her to find her smiling at him, and he blinks before following her gaze to the raised finger he’d brandished unconsciously to underline his point.  He makes a face and lets her hand drop back into her lap.  “You know at times I get the distinct impression you’re enjoying this far more than I am.”

“Quite probably,” she agrees, shrugging eloquently.  “I think I am more comfortable sharing than you are.”

“Even yourself?” he shoots back.

She nods.  “Even myself.”  She holds up his hands and looks at them a moment, turning them over to study his palms.  He has a small, thin scar which runs a straight line down from the base of his smallest finger to the heel of his left palm—a memento of painful times.  He wonders if she’s noticed it; it’s very discrete, unless the light shines at a particular angle.  How closely has she looked?  Has she looked at all?  He hasn’t, but it’s been tempting on several occasions.

She sets his hands carefully on his knees.  “So, electrical,” she says.  “Have we passed by any planets, any space stations, that could be sending out some sort of signal?  Or any other ships, perhaps?  Do you remember being electrocuted by anything recently?  I don’t.”

“No, not off the top of my head,” he admits, brushing Jenna’s hair off his forehead.

She taps at the cushion next to his ear and hops off the back of the couch.  “Come on.”

“Yes?”

“To the recreation room.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Humour me.”

The alternative is to sit and watch his thoughts go round in circles, so he stands and follows her out.  The recreation room is large and fairly empty and, having only visited it once during his first cursory inspection of the ship, Avon has little knowledge of what might be done with it.  One wall is studded with full-length mirrors; the other is lined with double-doored closets.  Jenna leads him to the back of the room, to a section of floor that has been sunken down and inlaid with a large dark red mat.  She turns to face him, unbuttoning the navy blue jacket she’s wearing and toeing off his shoes.

“Barefoot,” she tells him.  “And you might want to tie my hair back.”

“With what?” he asks warily.  Her expression on his face is open and happy, and he finds it unnerving.  He can’t remember once looking into a mirror to see his reflection quite so…relaxed.  Engaged.  Unguardedly good-natured.  Not even before his arrest; not even before Anna.

“Here.”  She turns him around and braids the hair back out of his face; it’s thick and coarse enough that the braid holds fairly well, even with nothing to tie it off.  “I wasn’t all that worried about taking on Carn,” she says to the back of his head.  “I’ve had combat and defence training.  I thought that in an inherently stronger body, it would only be easier.”  She shrugs and heads out onto the mat.  “But that just goes to show that strength is no substitute for skill.”

His pride is stung a little, and he stands at the edge of the mat and does not take off her shoes.  “And?”

“Come on,” she says again, grinning and beckoning.  “I’m going to teach you judo.  Not the entire art form, of course, but a few tricks here and there.”

“I’m quite capable of taking care of myself,” he points out.

She settles Avon’s hands on his hips.  “You’re strong and you have a mean right hook,” she admits, “but this body is obviously not very good with hand-to-hand combat.  Look,” she continues, when he stays where he is, “it’s fun, at least I think so.  And I think you’ll find it fun too.  My body is used to the movements—you’ll have the help of muscle memory, and the exercise is enjoyable.  And I already know what I’m doing, so I can help your body learn the motions.  It’s an easy win for both of us.”

Avon considers it, and then sits at the edge of the mat and drags off her heels.  He leaves them by her pile of his shoes and jacket and joins her, because he had been impressed with her and the way she’d moved, and she’s right, learning a few more tricks can only be useful.  It will never be easier than it is right now, in a body that is fitter than his and knows what it’s doing.  And accepting help from her isn’t as galling as it could be—perhaps the theory of solidarity through misfortune holds some weight after all.

She puts them through a series of stretching exercises, which he finds oddly wonderful and which make her wince when she finds his body less flexible than hers.  Then she shows him how to roll if he’s thrown to the ground: over one shoulder, across the back diagonally and off the hip.  He has to crouch down and lean slowly forward until his shoulder touches the mat, and then topple over and come up a few times, before the move makes sense in his mind.  His awkwardness makes him feel a fool, but he perseveres until he works up the nerve to try it more quickly.  Then it's as natural as breathing and he comes up to his feet, grinning.  She’d been right: this _is_ fun.

They move on to hand-throws.  She shows him the one she’d tried on Carn: she has Avon swing slowly at her, as if holding a knife, and she catches his wrist carefully in both hands, steps back, and pulls, sending him flying.  The room whirls as he hits the mat and rolls hip over hip, but Jenna’s body uses the momentum to tumble right back onto its feet, where he wobbles before regaining his balance.

She comes at him with the same attack, her movements slower even than she’d wanted his, and he fights to remember exactly how she’d managed it.  It takes, once again, several tries before it suddenly clicks, and he steps and tugs with smooth speed and sends Jenna spinning across the mat in much the same fashion as she had him.  She regains her feet more sloppily, and rubs a drop of sweat from his forehead with the back of a hand.  She’s breathing heavily and laughing, and he crouches down into a defensive stance automatically, grinning back.

She moves close and drops as if making a sweep at his legs, but she’s still moving stiffly in his body and doesn’t come at him quickly enough.  He sees a chance and chops his hand down toward her shoulder, careful to use only enough force to suggest he could have used more.

He realises he’s made a mistake a second too late.  She darts under his attack, catching his wrist and windmilling his arm to twist it like a pretzel.  It locks uncomfortably by his ear, and they both freeze, in an apparent stalemate.

“Now what?” he asks, and she exerts a little pressure and he gasps in shock and starts to drop to his knees.  She releases him instantly, and he rubs at his abused wrist and tries to catch his breath.

“You set me up, for that,” he notes, intrigued.

“You like competition,” she answers.  She is unapologetic, but he’d expect no less.  “I thought you might be tempted to throw in a move of your own.”

“Impressive,” he says, and means it.  He starts to add something about not having thought he was so predictable, but Blake’s voice from the doorway interrupts him.

“Very.”

Avon turns to see him step into the room and approach.  His arms hang loosely at his sides and his expression is open and easy, a change from the strained glower he’d worn when last they’d seen him.  Avon assumes the meeting between Blake and his revolutionaries had gone well.  “Is this a private tutorial or can anyone join?”

Jenna has turned away, her entire attention focused in on their self-appointed leader.  "The more the merrier, or so they say."

Blake flashes her a quick smile.

“Back already?” Avon asks idly, keeping his eyes on Jenna.  He refuses to let his own orbit be so easily swayed and caught by the force of Blake's presence, for all he can feel the tug of it from across the room.

“Back already,” Blake answers.  “Not a tense moment the entire time.  Quite a pleasant homecoming, really—as clandestine homecomings go.”  Avon’s eyes flick to his face in time to catch his expression still into wistfulness.  He shakes it quickly off.  “In and out in less than an hour.  Which means we can set course for whichever planet you and Cally have next on our list.”

Jenna looks back and forth between them a moment, then sighs dramatically and puts Avon’s hands on his hips.  She looks like an exasperated school master, and Avon winces privately.

“Oh, for goodness sake,” she says.  “You could have told me Blake knew.”

Avon flashes her his most devilish smirk.  “Ah, it must have slipped my mind; I do apologise.”

She shakes her head at the floor, tapping the fingers of one hand against his hip.  Blake’s eyes dance and Avon heads for the edge of the mat and their shoes.  “Do feel free to unadopt that particular posture, any time,” he tells her, tugging on his socks, “before you make us both look any more foolish.”

“I’ll do what I like,” she shoots back, but there's no heat to it, only wry amusement.  Her hands drop and she joins him by their pile of clothes.

She’s sitting nearer Blake than Avon is, and when she’s finished pulling on his shoes she reaches to him, apparently automatically, for a hand up.  Blake catches the hand without blinking.  Avon stares.  It is only when she’s standing that she glances down at their clasped hands and says, “Oh, probably oughtn’t to do that.  Particularly not in front of the rest of the crew.”

Blake drops her hand, but bestows that beautiful warm smile on her, and she smiles happily back and it makes Avon’s face _radiant_.  Avon clambers to his feet—it’s difficult to get from a sprawl on the floor to standing when wearing three inch heels, which explains why Jenna’s so used to asking Blake’s help—and walks from the room.

 

~*~

 

“Where are we going, then, Cally?” Blake asks.

“Zen has analysed the remaining fuel and identified it as some kind of crystal,” Cally answers.  “He says there is only one planet on which the crystals can be found; a planet called Titum.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” Gan says.

“It’s about three-quarters of the way across the galaxy from here, and outside Federation Space,” Cally replies.  “It has two sister planets, Liryal and Varados.  All three orbit each other as well as their star.”

“Inhabited?” Blake asks.

She shrugs.  “Zen won’t tell us.”

His eyebrows raise.  “Won’t or can’t?”

“Won’t,” Jenna says bluntly.

“Hmm.”  Blake worries the end of his index finger with his teeth.  “Vexing.”

“The last time Zen refused to give us information about something, we went along and did it anyway.  And almost suffocated,” Avon warns him.

“I haven’t forgotten.  But unfortunately this is rather too critical to ignore.  We’ll just have to be very cautious.”

“Famous last words, Blake, if ever there were,” Jenna says.

“You have a better idea?” Avon snaps at her.  She looks at him in surprise, and then settles back and holds up his hands in a gesture of surrender.  Avon frowns and faces front again.  He wonders why the repartee came out more sharply than he’d intended, and as if in answer he sees that joyous contentment his face had worn as Jenna had smiled.

 _Damn her for being happy_ , he thinks viciously, and immediately condemns himself for fool.  Jenna has the ability to make friends and keep them, and if Blake is counted among the closest, it's no skin off Avon's nose.  He doesn't begrudge her any kind of friendship.  He just wishes she’d have the decency to keep her happiness off his face, particularly when Avon's there to see it.

“Zen,” he orders, “set course for Sector Twelve: the planet Titum.  Speed standard-by-six.”

“Confirmed,” Zen says.

 

~*~

 

Zen plots them a very indirect course around a dozen planets and the majority of the Federation’s space fleet and tells them the journey will take a little less than thirty hours.  Avon points out that he can man the flight deck alone, but Blake points out that he has the first watch, so Avon heads to Jenna’s room and lies down on her bed.  His mind is as busy as it ever is, but Jenna's body doesn't have the trouble his has finding sleep, and he's been enjoying the opportunity to get regular rest.  It is perhaps, he considers, one of the few benefits to his situation.

He crosses his feet, not bothering to remove her boots, and laces her fingers together over her stomach and has just fallen into a light doze when there’s a knock at the door.

Cally’s voice calls, “Jenna?”

For a brief moment he lies on his back and stares at the ceiling and imagines not answering; then he gets to his feet and opens the door.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

Avon blinks at her, non-plussed.  Her tone and expression are worried sympathy but the question is socially abrupt, and it seems to expect an immediate and honest answer out of him.  Is it because Cally and Jenna are both women that she asks him a straight question, and expects a straight answer?  Or because she’s an alien, raised by a people with a different set of conversational rules?  Or because she and Jenna are friends?  Avon runs briefly through the list of people he’s considered friends in his life, and slots them one by one into Cally’s place facing him.  Anna—he might have been honest with Anna, if she’d asked; he’d always been painfully honest with Anna.  But then they’d been in love, madly.

Cally’s not in love with Jenna, is she?  What if they’ve been going to bed together?  Pretending easy intimacy with Blake, before the man had found out, had been difficult enough.  What if Avon has to bluff his way through a full-blown love affair?

His thoughts have grown hysterical, and it’s that realisation that grounds his mind.  He’d watched Cally and Jenna interact, before he’d ended up in Jenna’s body.  Avon’s observant enough to have picked up the signs of physical intimacy, and there had been none.  Cally’s attitude now is of a platonic comfortableness in Jenna’s company, not that of a worried lover.  And Jenna would have warned him.  He sighs and pushes the door further open, stepping back.

“Come in,” he tells her, and her eyes grow wide.

“As bad as that?”

He almost throws back his head to laugh, but Jenna wouldn’t behave that way, so he confines himself to a brief chuckle as he shuts the door behind her.

In the very next second he decides he’s not up to carrying on even one more conversation as someone else, not right now.

“Take a seat,” he tells her, “and try to read my mind.”

 Cally sits carefully, her expression growing more worried by the moment.  “You know I can’t read minds.”

“But you can perceive things, small things: a feeling or a sensation.  Try.  If you would.”

She frowns and closes her eyes, and her frown grows more pronounced.  “I sense…confusion and unhappiness.  And, I don’t know what else...you are…not yourself.”  Her eyes open.  “You, you’re not Jenna.  Who are you?”  She leaps to her feet, and the skirt and long sleeves of her gown flutter around her as she moves to put the chair between them, clutching the back of it as if of half a mind to pick it up and attack him with it.

“Avon,” he says quickly, shortly.  “Don’t worry, it’s only Avon.  And Jenna is me.  We’ve been switched.”

She stares.  “That’s…that’s utterly mad.”

“Don’t you think I know that?”

She takes a step forward and reaches tentatively out, laying her hand across his.  He can almost hear her, as if she’s about to speak telepathically; a brush of her mind against his senses.  “Avon,” she says, wondering.  “Yes, it is you.”

“I know it is,” he answers drily.

“But—but it explains quite a lot.”  She offers him a tentative smile, uncertain whether he’ll want to share the joke or to take offense.  “How did it happen?”

Her fingers are still resting on his wrist.  He paces away and when he turns back, with several feet of space now between them, her hand has dropped to her side.

“I have no idea.  I woke up in that bed eighty-five hours ago, looking like this.  I’ve searched for answers, we both have.  Perhaps, being a telepath, you’ll be able to come up with some other theory, something we’ve missed.”

“Not off the top of my mind,” she replies.  “I’ve never heard of anything like this happening before.”

“I’d appreciate any help you might be able to give us.”

Her lips press briefly together and she says gently, “You know, you really ought to tell the others.”  Her tone is firm but her expression careful.  Gone is the ease with which she’d asked after Jenna’s state of mind.  It is evident she considers her ground with Avon much less sure.

“Blake knows.  We’d rather no one else did.”

“Do you expect them to be unkind?”

For some reason the question flusters him.  It is not in any way accusing or at all hostile, but he feels defensive and hurt, and an odd sense of despair.  “What I expect is that they’ll be awkward and make crude jokes, avoid us or be overly-polite, forget with whom they’re talking and then stumble over themselves to make amends.  People rarely behave with any kind of logic or finesse, when confronted with the unfathomable.”

“It is only Gan and Vila who don’t know,” Cally argues, “if Blake and I do, now.  Do you really think it would be that bad?”

Avon sits on the bed and runs his hands over his face.  Then he wonders if he’s smudged his mascara.

“Possibly not,” he admits.  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Cally.  It's true this hasn’t been a pleasant experience, but it’s hardly enough to send me into emotional upheaval.  Still, I feel as though I’m losing the ability to think rationally.”

There’s a brief but notable silence, and he looks up to find Cally considering him.  “I don’t mean to pry—into either Jenna’s business or yours—but is it perhaps your body’s…well…time?”

He stares at her, having somehow managed to forget Jenna’s earlier warning.  “Are you telling me that this is normal?  That once a month the entire human female population turns weepy and illogical?”  Anna hadn’t—or, he doesn’t remember her having done.  But it’s certainly how he’s been feeling.

“Of course not.”  Cally looks mildly offended.  “All people are different and behave differently.  I’ve known women who hardly notice a difference in their temperaments, while others seem to turn into moody adolescents.  I've known men who've behaved like that, too,” she grumbles under her breath.

He has a suspicion it's a dig at him, but lets it go by in his state of utter woe.  “Wonderful.”

She joins him on the edge of the bed, and pats his hand comfortingly.  Avon blinks.  “Right now your body is producing a jumble of hormones,” she tells him, “and they are going to have some effect on your mood.  It’s basic chemistry.”

“Terrific.”

“And you’ve been under a lot of recent strain, along with the more usual stress which seems to plague us on board _the Liberator_.  It can hardly help.”

“All right, enough, you’ve made a good enough case.  Is there anything to be done?”

She nods and stands, heading for Jenna’s small washroom.  “Most women take something that helps calm the effects, and regulate mood-swings.”  Her voice is muffled, and he stands and moves to join her.  She’s rifling through the slim cabinet set into the wall next to the door, and as he pauses in the doorway she pulls out a small jar of capsules.  “These.”

He takes them and looks them over.  The jar is plain and unmarked; the capsules inside are striped an ostentatious green and blue.

“You ought to double check with Jenna first, to see what kind of dose she usually takes.  Too many could make your problems worse, not better.”

“Thank you,” he says.  He holds up the bottle in a sort of toast.  “I’ll make it up to you sometime.”

She shuts the cabinet door and smiles at him.  “No need,” she answers.  “Although I may take you up on it anyway, next time Blake wants me to remain behind and man the teleport.”

“Ha! Done, and in a heartbeat.”

 

~*~

 

He rests until it is his turn to take shift, and then heads to the flight deck to relieve Cally.  She smiles at him as she leaves but doesn’t say anything, and he perches in Jenna’s chair momentarily to check the event logs and their flight progress before moving down to the more comfortable lounges below.  The bottle of pills Cally had given him sits in a pocket—he’d had to mount an almost full-scale assault on Jenna’s wardrobe to find anything with a pocket—and once his shift has crept quietly by, he leaves the flight deck to Gan and heads off toward his own cabin.

“Yes?” his voice calls, and he opens the door and heads in.  He’s constructed a quick but sincere apology for his earlier behaviour and prepared a few questions concerning his conversation with Cally, but his train of thought is derailed entirely by the sight of Jenna.  She’s lying on his stomach on his bed, chin on his hands and a datapad propped up against the pillow in front of her, and is kicking his bare feet aimlessly in the air.

He searches for words to accurately convey his feelings.  “Do I take it this is the sight every visitor is now greeted with?” he asks, voice dry with horror at the thought.

“I didn’t tell you to come in, you did that on your own,” she answers cheerfully.  He tears his eyes off his bare feet and focuses them on his face.  She’s smiling an odd, carefree smile.  “And no one but you would have entered the dread abode without express invitation, so you’ve nothing to worry about.”

He cocks his head and narrows his eyes.

“Have you been drinking?”  He does a quick sweep of the room and his gaze falls on an empty wine bottle and two glasses, sitting at his desk.  “Ah yes, so I see.  And not alone?”

“Vila came by.”  She sits up and lets Avon’s feet dangle off the edge of the bed.  “And I’m not drunk, don’t worry.  Just pleasantly soothed.”

He fetches a glass of water and presses it into her hands.  “I don’t drink often, as a rule.  You’ll want this.”

“You’re probably right.”  She downs it and holds it back up daintily between his thumb and middle finger.  He refills it without comment, and she sips it more slowly.  “How are you?”

“Cally said I am going through mood swings caused by hormonal changes.”

“Oh Avon, I’m sorry!”  She starts to get to her feet.  “I should have remembered that, there are pills—”

He holds them out.  “Cally found them, but couldn’t advise me on how many to take.”

“Take a full one, with some of this.”  She holds out the cup to him, still half-full.  “One every twelve hours should do.”

“You don’t mind?” he asks, taking the cup from her and raising it expressively.  Her eyebrow and lips quirk slightly, and he realises the folly of the question and laughs.  “Good point.”

“It won’t work instantly, but soon you should start to feel more stable.  I tend to get a bit…stressed, without them.  As I’m sure you noticed.”

“These are very useful, then,” he says, because it seems a more polite thing to say than _Yes, rather_.

“I take it you told Cally, too?”

“I did.”

“Did you and she have a nice chat?”

“She was very helpful, once she’d recovered from the shock.  Blake watched us behaving as ourselves and figured it out over a matter of some hours, but I rather dumped the news on Cally.”

“Perhaps we’d better tell Vila and Gan, too,” Jenna suggests.

“You didn’t mention it to Vila over drinks?”

“No.”  She bites a lip, frowning.  “And he might be more than a little hurt at the revelation, actually.  He came to apologise to you; brought the wine with him and even let me drink half of it, so he must have really meant it.”

“Apologise?”

“He feels bad for ratting on you to Blake.”

“Will wonders never cease?”

“You should be nicer to him.  He quite likes you, though he’s a little nervous of you.  But he really opened up over the wine; we had a grand time.”

“Ah, hence his theoretical hurt at the revelation that he’d been speaking to you, rather than to me?  And that you'd played the part of accepting his apologies, on my behalf.”

“You might as well say it like it is, Avon.”

“Lied to him.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“We’ll keep it from them.  Blake and Cally will be discreet, and you and I are good enough actors to continue the charade—as long as you are not drunk and I am not emotional.”

“Hear hear,” she says, stealing back the water and downing the rest of it.  He considers, then retrieves the wine jug, rinses it in his washroom, and fills it with more water.  They move to the desk; Jenna sprawls in his chair, loose-limbed and astonishingly comfortable, while Avon sits across from her in Vila’s seat, crossing her legs carefully and lacing her fingers together on the table.

“What is it like?” he asks, suddenly curious of her experiences with this.  “To be a man?”

Jenna considers.  “It’s odd, but I’m starting, sort of, to become used to it.  It still takes me by surprise, but it doesn’t feel quite so…alien.  Do you know what I mean?”

He nods.  “I do, exactly.”

Between them they finish the water, and Avon refills it again.  Jenna checks the time and stands.  “I’m going to nap before my shift; I’m up after Gan, so that should give me plenty of time.  Why don't we meet in the recreation room again, after?  Exercise will help, too.”

“Very well,” Avon agrees.  “It was diverting enough.”

She grins at him.  “You enjoy being good at things, Avon,” she teases.  “You should take advantage of this opportunity while you can.  And I’ll whip your body into shape in the meantime.”

“Don’t forget the water,” Avon suggests meaningfully, as he heads for the door, “or you’ll have to track Cally down for her hangover cure.”

“All right.”  She takes the wine bottle by the neck, hooks one of the glasses with a finger, and heads over to his bed, placing them on the floor by the wall where they won’t be stepped on.  “Remember, Vila’s a friend of mine,” she warns him, “and now he’s a friend of yours.  You’d better treat him as one.”

“Ah, but I treat everyone equally!” he replies lightly, pausing at the door to flash a grin over his shoulder at her.

"The same bitter medicine for friend or foe?"  Her tone is wry.  "You may find honest relationships pleasant, Avon.  At least give it a try."


	5. The Crystals

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers-ish (not plot-wise) for ‘Redemption.’

Avon launches another attack on Jenna’s wardrobe and is successful in finding both lighter-weight, simpler clothing and a tie for her hair.  Their second lesson in improved hand-to-hand is therefore much more comfortable, although Jenna isn’t above using his looser clothing several times as leverage to throw him around.  She herself had evidently made a trip to the wardrobe room and found something similar: a set of white cotton trousers and a shirt with a slit that goes all the way down his chest and sports one simple clasp to keep the ensemble mostly decent.  It doesn’t look half bad on him, and he makes a mental note to keep it—it’s not warm enough for everyday wear in space, but if they find themselves on a hot planet it could come in handy.

He loses track of the time quickly.  Blake wanders in at some point and leans against the wall, watching them and calling out suggestions every now and again, some of which are helpful and most of which are not.  Avon gets the impression that they’re not really intended to be.  Blake seems to be entertaining himself, at any rate, and Jenna laughs whenever Avon slips up and allows himself to be distracted. 

Cally eventually drags Blake away, which leaves Avon free to devote his entire attention back to the matter at hand.  Blake’s uncanny ability to distract is one of his more irritating qualities.

Jenna drills him in five throws and two kicks until he isn’t trying to think each one through anymore.  She pushes his body just as hard, and when they finally call it quits her shirt is drenched across the back and under the arms.  He’s feeling sweaty himself and imagines that in that case Jenna must be feeling a great deal more tired and sore than he is.  She doesn’t say or do anything other than look pleased, though, and slap him once good-naturedly on the shoulder. 

It takes a moment for him to really notice the gesture, and he wonders idly whether this unusual physical contact will continue between them once they’re back in their right bodies.  Touching someone else is a greater presumption, after all, than touching one’s own shoulder after tossing one’s own body around a mat for a few hours.  He’s not immune to the feeling—it’s a little like loaning someone a jacket to wear, and then casually straightening the collar or brushing off a speck of lint from time to time. 

The thought of bodies being exchangeable articles is not a thought he’s ever had before, nor is it a particularly pleasant one.

They have time to wash up and then spend a few hours on their own projects—Avon doesn’t know what Jenna does; he heads to the engine room and prepares, as much as he is able, for their impending influx of fuel.  They’ll have to switch off most of the power in order to load the crystals safely into the fuel banks, though they’ll be able to maintain life support—it would be a poorly designed system if the only way to refuel it were in a spacesuit—and possibly the shields.  They’ll have to cut most of the lights but the emergency backups should give them enough visibility to see what they’re doing, and Avon doesn’t like the idea of floating above an unknown planet without some means of defence. 

He’s just finishing up when Blake’s voice calls him to the flight deck.  He’s the last to arrive; he takes Jenna’s position and eyes the image of the planet they’re now orbiting, which Zen has put on the main screen.  It has a few dark bodies of water but is mainly yellowy-brown landmass, and peppered with what must be extraordinarily tall mountain ranges, considering their prominence from this distance.

“Zen, pull back and give us visual of the three planets,” Blake orders, and Titum grows smaller as two other planets appear in the screen around it.  They’re remarkably close together, for planets that large; the gravitational balance must be delicate indeed.  “Varados is the blue and brown one on the left,” Blake says, apparently for Avon’s benefit because it doesn’t look like it’s news to anyone else, “and Liryal is on the far side.”

“Why’s it so twinkly?” Vila asks, and Avon considers.  Liryal _is_ twinkly where the light of the star hits it, as though it’s covered in diamonds.

“That must be very bright when seen from the other two planets,” Cally says.

Blake nods.  “Zen, scan Liryal; give us any information you can.”

“No information can be given.”

“Surely a basic scan—!” Avon scoffs, but Zen merely repeats himself.  Avon frowns at Blake, who frowns back.

“Never a good sign, when Zen _won’t_ tell us something,” Gan says.  “Zen, can you tell us at least whether Titum has earth-like gravity?  Or breathable air?”

“No information—”

“Can be given,” Avon, Vila and Jenna chorus together.

“Yes, we know,” Jenna adds. 

“We’ll have to go down in spacesuits, just in case,” Cally says.

“I don’t like spacesuits, much.”

“You don’t like anything, Vila,” she tells him.

“Now that’s just not true!  I’m a man of refined tastes.”

“By whose standards?”

“My own, naturally.”

“We can assume, can’t we, Blake, that there will be a breathable atmosphere on Titum?” Avon points out. 

“Yes, considering _Liberator’s_ atmosphere when we boarded her,” Jenna agrees. 

“Because it was identical to ours, and whoever built the ship must have come to this planet for the crystals to fuel her?”  Blake considers.   “It’s a reasonable hypothesis, except we have no idea how old _Liberator_ is.  These crystals might once have been found on more planets than just this one.”  He waves a hand at the viewscreen.

“Or they might have donned spacesuits to mine the crystals in the first place,” Vila points out.  “Though why anyone would go through that much trouble when there are a million other fuel sources in the galaxy…”

“Well we can sit here tossing theories around, or we can make a decision of some kind or another,” Avon says.  “I for one am happy to go down with just an oxygen mask and a sensor.  There’s obviously some kind of atmosphere; a spacesuit seems like overkill.”  He indicates the hazy atmospheric film that covers the planet like a thick skin. 

Blake nods agreement.  “Right.  Jenna, take us in to orbit as discretely as you can, then set the controls to automatic.  Everyone else, kit up.  Vila, you’ll man the teleport.”

“Excellent, that’s always my favourite part of any mission.”

“And stay alert,” Blake orders.

“When have you known me not to be?”

“Shall I answer that?”

“Nah, maybe not.”

Their voices fade down the corridor as Avon considers the viewscreen.  The three planets’ orbit of each other makes finding a permanently safe position fairly impossible; either they stay on Titum’s dark side and risk being seen when the dark side inevitably turns to face the other planets, or they keep Titum between _the Liberator_ and the sister planets, and become totally visible from Titum itself when their side swings round to face the sun.  A route that would keep them completely safe would require constant manual manoeuvring or a very sophisticated and complex orbital pattern programmed into the computer, and he doesn’t have the time for that.  Eventually he flies them to the relative bottom of the planet and sets them in tight orbit there, on the theory that the south pole will, like Earth’s, be relatively uninhabited.  Then he follows the others to the teleport room.

 

~*~

 

There is a breathable atmosphere on Titum, and rather than lug around all the unnecessary equipment, they send Avon briefly back up to the ship with it.  He dumps it all on top of the teleport bracelets and heads back down.

They’ve landed in a lush green area that ends abruptly five yards ahead of them, as though a giant had come along and wiped away half the forest.  They head toward it, following the homing device Cally had calibrated to the remaining crystals on board.  A gravelly cliff rises up above them, and the homing signal points them straight into it.

“Hmm,” Blake says.  “Well, I suppose there’s nothing for it but to look for a way in.”  

Jenna steps forward just as someone yells, “Stop, _stop_!”

They turn in surprise to find themselves faced with a humanoid, although his gently ridged nose and forehead say he’s not entirely human.  He’s wearing a sort of dirty toga and worn boots and has a hand raised to them, a look of fear on his face.  He freezes, apparently uncertain whether to make his way through the trees toward them or turn and run.

“Hello,” Blake says pleasantly, and Avon gets the mad urge to laugh.

“I—I thought you were aliens,” the man says doubtfully.  “You look like aliens.”

“We are; aliens to this planet, that is,” Gan answers.  “We’re from Earth.”

“But you,” he says, looking at Jenna, who is standing with one foot in the gravel out from under the trees.  “You are plugged in.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Only the Altas and their guards—or their slaves—can cross the border: it’s protected by a forcefield.”

“Who are the Altas?” Blake asks, as Jenna says, “Look, I promise I’m not one, whatever they are.”

“And we’re not slaves, either,” Cally puts in firmly.  The man looks dumbfounded and not a little suspicious.  “What’s your name?” she asks. 

“Thol.”

“We’re here looking for something,” Avon tells him.  “Can you help us?”

“Crystals,” Blake continues.  “About the size of my fist, maybe a little smaller.  Our ship uses them as fuel.”

“You _are_ Altas.”  But the man looks uncertain still.

“We’re not native to this system.  We found our ship floating in space, unmanned.  We’ve been flying in her ever since, but we need to refuel—”

“And our computer told us this is the only planet that has the crystals we need,” Avon interrupts him.

Thol looks at each of them in turn very carefully, and Avon tries to hide his impatience.

“I believe you,” he says finally.  “It’s the only thing that makes sense.  I’m sorry; you must understand, if you had been…I value my freedom very highly.”

“Don’t we all?” Blake asks mildly, with that edge of fiery idealism in his voice.  It seems to reach Thol; he straightens from his wary half-crouch and smiles very slightly back at Blake.

“This is called Spaceworld,” Thol tells them.  “These three planets.  They’re ruled by the System; the Altas are plugged into it.  Anyone not plugged in is put to work.”

“Plugged in,” Avon echoes.  “The System is a computer?” 

Thol nods.

“If everyone’s either plugged into the System or enslaved,” Gan asks, “why aren’t you?”

“I’m a resistor.  There aren’t many of us, but we live freely out here, as long as we can keep clear of the Altas.  And it’s better than dying in there.”  He juts his chin toward the cliff.

“More resistors,” Avon murmurs to Blake.  “It’s almost like you’re a magnet, drawing them to you.”

“These Altas are apparently slave-keepers,” Blake murmurs back.  “Would you rather we’d run into them instead?”

Avon spreads his hands.  “Oh, I wasn’t complaining.”

“I can help you,” Thol says, and then to Jenna, “Only come back under the trees.  You’re making me nervous.”

Jenna shrugs and rejoins them.

“What happens if you’re not plugged in?” Blake asks curiously, reaching a hand out to the clear air a foot from him.  He yelps and pulls his hand back almost instantly.

“Level five shock,” Thol answers, a little redundantly. 

“Plugged in.  I wonder…”  Avon steps forward and past Blake.

“No!” Thol cries, “Once is fine, but If you set it off a second time...”

But nothing happens.  Avon steps out from under the trees and looks carefully down the right and left of the odd line of them, before heading back.  It is eerily quiet.

Thol’s expression is unreadable.  “Come,” he says.  “I’ll take you back to base.”

 

~*~

 

“It’s Jenna and me,” Avon says to Blake.  “It’s whatever happened to us, it’s got to be.”

Blake, tapping at his lips, nods slowly.  “It does seem to be.”

They’re standing together against the rock wall of the cave Thol had brought them to.  He hadn’t been exaggerating; there are no more than ten or eleven others here, though he’d told them when he’d ushered them in that there were a few other groups hiding around the planet.  It’s fairly dark and cold; light comes from only three yellow globes, positioned in the dirt at various points across the cave.  One of them is flickering off and on—Avon supposes its power is running down.

“What other explanation is there?” he asks.

“None that I can think of,” Blake admits.  “Thol!”

Their guide, standing some feet away talking with Gan and Jenna, heads over.  Blake turns to Avon and raises his eyebrows, very obviously giving him the floor.

“My name is Avon,” Avon tells Thol.  “About five days ago I woke up in this body, which is Jenna’s.”  He nods toward her.  “Jenna woke up in mine.  We’ve been able to find no explanation, but whatever it is, it seems to be related somehow to this System of yours.”

Thol frowns and says nothing.  Avon resists tapping his foot.  Thol seems to be naturally reticent, but he’s clearly thinking it over.  If he can offer them any advice or, better yet any help, Avon can afford to wait for it.

“The Altas are connected with diamonds, here,” Thol says finally, indicating the centre of his forehead.  “Which you obviously do not have.  Still, the System recognised you.  It suggests it was somehow responsible for this.  You have never visited this area before?  Never met the Altas?”

Blake shakes his head.

“I can only assume, then, that your ship did this to you.”

“How?  Why?  It’s never done anything like this before, nor has it since.”

“No live connection should have been sparked by your ship, anyway,” Thol muses.  “The planet hoppers and the deep space vehicles are crafted by perfected computer programming.  Unless you had tampered with your ship’s computer in some way…”

Avon sighs in realisation and shuts his eyes against the entirely too amused grin which Blake sends his way.

“I told you it was an immature and thoughtless venture,” Blake says, laughter ringing through his voice.

“Actually you told Jenna,” Avon says sourly.

“Yes, I must apologise to her for that, and perhaps give you the lecture instead?”

“No need.  I promise I’ve got the gist of it.”  To Thol, Avon explains shortly, “I was convinced by another member of our crew to reprogramme _the Liberator’s_ food processing unit, the evening before it happened.”

Thol nods. 

“But I didn’t feel anything odd,” he continues.  “I felt no electrical current; nothing to indicate I might have crossed any wires I oughtn’t to have.  What’s more, I asked our main computer and it could give me no information—and it should have been able to, if the anomaly originated from the computer.”

“It probably wouldn’t have realised, same as you,” Thol answers.  “Interconnectedness is what the computers are used to because everyone in Spaceworld is connected to the System.  But when you requested information, your computer would have been operating under your parameters, not those of its creators.”

“There’s a big difference between linking two minds, and swapping them out all together,” Blake points out.

“I imagine that was the best it could do.”

“The best it could do?”  The flickering light is beginning to give Avon a headache.

“No diamonds to act as nodes.”  Thol shrugs.  “It probably tried to create the link anyway and couldn’t cut it off.  Your minds just kept moving toward each other until they ended up entirely switched.”

“It sounds absolutely crazy,” Blake admits, chuckling a little.

“Why not Vila?” Avon asks Thol.  “We were in the same room together, and Jenna was nowhere around.  Why not switch us?”

“Well you were already cooperating with each other,” Blake offers.  “Perhaps it thought you wouldn’t benefit from being switched?”

Avon shoots him a withering look.  “This wasn’t some misguided but philanthropic gesture, Blake.  This is a computer we’re talking about, and to a computer, compatibility means greater efficiency.  Two people working together would be the perfect pair to form the beginnings of a system—if that is indeed what it was trying to do.”

Thol nods.

“Well.  Were you thinking of her at the time?” Blake hazards.

Avon opens his mouth to deny it out of hand, and hesitates.  “Ah,” he says.  “Yes, she did come up in the conversation—in fact, _I_ brought her up by name.  Vila was considering whom he might share his new bounty with.  He mentioned he’d better keep it from Blake, as he wasn’t likely to be pleased—” 

Blake snorts.

“—and I said that Jenna, too, was unlikely to be amused.”

“That will probably be it.  The computer sensed a cross-purpose and tried to right it,” Thol tells him.

“Why weren’t Vila and Blake switched?” Avon asks.

“Probably because Vila wasn’t fiddling with the wires,” Blake murmurs.  Avon throws him a dirty look, but in the dim light it’s entirely possibly Blake doesn’t catch it, which seems a waste. 

“We can help switch you back,” Thol offers.  “If you want to be, that is.”

“Oh, more than you could possibly imagine,” Avon answers.

“Could you help us with the crystals, too?” Blake asks.

“We’ve just been talking with Molla about that,” Cally says, coming up with a young woman at her side.  Jenna and Gan follow them.  “She says the crystals are mined, all over the planet, and shipped to Varados where they build the ships.  The nearest is in that cliff where Thol found us.”

“We can tell you where to go, though none of us will be able to go with you.  Only you two, Jenna and Avon, will be able to pass through the barrier.”

Avon flashes his teeth at Blake.  “How unexpectedly useful.” 

Blake raises an eyebrow at him but doesn’t protest it.

“From inside the barrier, will they be able to teleport up to the ship?” Cally asks.

“Yes, and back down again as well,” Thol answers.  “But again: only the two of you.”

“Why not the rest of us?” Gan asks.  “Why can they pass through this force field?”

“We had a run-in with Spaceworld technology,” Avon says shortly.  “It recognises us and so thinks we’re these Altas, plugged into it.”

“Convenient.  When did this happen?”

“Better to do this as quickly as possible, don’t you think?” Jenna breaks in.  “And we can save the happy chatter for later.”

“All right,” Blake says.  “Cally, you and Gan teleport back up to the ship.  Cally, I want you to make sure everything’s as prepared as it can be for the crystals; Gan, help her with anything she needs, and get the ship ready to leave.  Jenna, Avon and I will stay down here; you two will sneak into the mines and I’ll direct you from here with Thol and Molla’s help.  Any questions?”

There are none.  Cally raises her bracelet to ask Vila for teleport, and Avon raises a hand.  “The ship will have to be powered down,” he tells them both.  “No engines running while the fuel hatch is open.  But if you take the lights off-line and switch most of the auto-repair circuits off, you’ll have enough power for life-support and the shields.”

Gan nods.  “Got it.”  They call Vila and the caves are brighter for an instant in the white light before they disappear.

“ _Up and safe_ ,” Gan says.

“Good,” Blake answers.  “Now for the tricky part.”

 

~*~

 

Avon and Jenna press themselves back as far as possible into a recess in the cavern wall, and the guard pass by without seeing them.  Unlike Federation troopers, this lot seem to be fairly observant, and as they carry guns very like theirs from _Liberator_ , Avon would rather not tangle with them.  Especially when, Avon reminds himself, they can quite probably call for backup with nothing but their brains, working for the System as they do.

“Come on,” Jenna whispers, and ducks back out into the passageway.  They follow the two guards from a distance until they reach a junction and split up.  Jenna and Avon halt, and Avon brings his bracelet to his mouth. 

“All right, three ways to go,” he whispers.  “Left, right, and straight ahead.”

“ _Straight ahead_ ,” comes Blake’s answer.  “ _Keep going until you reach a hover system, and take it up one level_.”

“How is it operated?”

“ _Simple up-down lever_ ,” says Thol’s voice faintly.  “ _You won’t have any trouble_.”

“Ha, famous words,” Jenna whispers to him as he lets his hand drop and they continue on.  She sounds, as she usually does when they’re risking life and limb, like she’s having a great deal of fun.  There is something to be said for the feeling of slinging a gun around, not that Avon would ever admit it, but in here a single blast might bring the roof and walls caving in.  The threat of a stuffy and painful death removes some of the pleasure from the experience.

They reach the hover shaft and call for a platform, which glides almost silently down to them from three levels up.  They step aboard and head up one level, taking it on faith that no one will be there waiting for them. 

Luck, for once, is with them.  The short corridor ahead is empty, and the room beyond it unmanned.  It’s also piled high with shiny silver crates.

“Haven’t we had enough of hauling boxes around?” Avon mutters. 

Jenna raises her bracelet and says, “Avon.  We’ve reached the repository—lock onto our signal and be sure to mark the coordinates so we can be teleported back.”

“ _Your trust in me warms my heart, Avon, it really does,_ ” Vila replies, and then they’re standing on _Liberator's_ teleport pad _._ “Well, where are the crystals?”

Avon rolls his eyes.  “Did he say teleport?  We hadn’t gotten any yet!”

“Oh, right, well I’ll just put you back down then.”

They reappear in the mine, exactly where they’d been standing.  “All right, grab a box…okay, Vila, teleport please,” Jenna says with infinite patience.  When they arrive back on the ship, Gan and Blake are waiting to haul their cargo off to the engine room.

“How many do you want?” Avon asks.

“As many as you think we have time for,” Blake answers.  “No harm in having extra on board, and we have the space for it.”

“Right.”  Avon nods to Vila, and down they go again.  The constant change in light is jarring, but the boxes are at least bright enough to see in the dim light of the mine.

They’re on their third pass when Jenna’s bracelet crackles.

“ _Grab your last load and prepare for teleport, you two; we’ve got company!_ ” Vila yells.

“Things never go smoothly, do they?” Avon asks rhetorically as the room fades and shimmers into bright light around them.  Gan and Blake have vanished, and Vila is running out of the room as they arrive.  Avon and Jenna leave the boxes where they are and head after him.

“What is it?” Avon barks as they reach the flight deck.

“ _Ah, Jenna!  How lovely to hear your voice again_.  _Still enjoying a life of crime?_ ”

“Servalan,” Avon says flatly.  “What a surprise.”

“ _I’d hoped it would be, my dear_.”

Blake switches off the sound and comes to Avon’s side.  “I need you and Cally in the engine room getting those crystals in,” he says.

“Why not go now, and load the damn things later when we’ve time to spare?”

“Second plasma bolt running,” comes Zen’s voice.  “Impact in ten seconds.”

“Two reasons; one, the engine has been taken off-line and practically gutted in preparation for this, and we’d have to put it back together again, and two—”

The ship rocks as the plasma bolt hits.  Avon and Blake reach out for each other’s elbows at the same moment, steadying one other as the ship rocks.

“Orbit lost.”

“Oh, that fun game again,” Avon quips.

“Exactly.  We’ve no engine to re-establish orbit, and if we’re knocked into the atmosphere with no fuel, we’re lost.”

Avon heads for the engine room.  Blake switches the communicator back on and Avon hears him yell, “Servalan, call him _off_ a moment!” but Avon doesn’t stay to hear her response.

Cally’s on her knees, pressing crystals one by one into the open ports in the fuel banks and flipping the ports shut.  She’s working her way up the wall; her fingers move quickly but the job is by nature a slow one.  The room is dim and the emergency lights are red, giving everything a pink shadow.  Avon snatches a handful of the crystals from the open box and starts up at the top, working down to meet her.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

“Shorr Carn.”

Avon curses.  “Isn’t he dead yet?  I knew those resistor friends of Blake’s would be useless.”

“Still alive and fairly enraged with Blake.” 

“He does make friends so easily, our Blake.”

Cally moves up a level.  She’s faster than he is; Jenna’s slim fingers make it easier to get the crystals into their places, but her hands are not as sure as his would have been.  “And then Servalan showed up,” she continues.  “She preened and taunted us for a while, and then had Carn open fire.”

“Supposing they miss us and hit the planet?”

“While our engines are down we’re a sitting target.”

“Don’t you think she knows that, though?  If they knock us into atmosphere she’ll never get this ship; it’ll be destroyed.”

“I told her that,” Blake says from the doorway.  Another blast hits, knocking Avon off his feet and Blake backwards into the wall.  Cally manages to keep her balance—the box of crystals rattles but is not overturned.  Blake recovers and heads to Avon’s side, taking a handful of the crystals and holding them for him so he doesn’t have to bend down each time he runs out.  “Strangely enough she didn’t believe me; seemed to think we were bluffing.”

“Either the engines are off or they’re not!” Avon argues, pointlessly.  “If they were on we’d be gone already, leaving her to gnash her teeth in our metaphorical dust!”

“You’re quite welcome to try to tell her that yourself,” Blake answers.  “Maybe you’ll have more luck with her than I did.”  They’re hit again, and the ship begins to tremble slightly.  They must be on the edge of the atmosphere.  It’s remarkable their shields have managed to hold them here as long as they have.  “On second thought, never mind,” Blake says.  “Don’t go anywhere.”  He pushes his handful of crystals off on Avon and starts in at the middle.  He’s slower than both of them but not by much—his hands are perfectly steady.  Avon remembers he used to be an engineer.

Cally reaches Blake’s rows and he stands and moves out of her way, catching Avon’s elbow to steady him as the ship shakes.

“She’ll blast us to pieces,” Avon mutters.  “I thought Carn wasn’t a friend of the Federation?”

“Apparently the price on our heads is enough to make any man rethink his priorities.”  The disgusted note in Blake’s voice makes Avon suspect he’s giving a direct quote.  “Not to mention the price on _Liberator_.  We were supposed to be blown up on Riibus 4 and leave the ship easily taken, but when we weren’t he became inventive.”

Cally and Avon meet at last.

“Get to the flight deck!” Avon orders.  “I need to get the system back online.”

She leaves at a run as he drops down to the open panel below and begins hooking the wires back together.  Blake crouches at his side and hands him tools when he demands them.

“Almost,” Avon tells him absently, “almost…there.  Done!”  He shoves the last wire into the dark abyss and slaps the screen back on the panel.  Blake, who still has a grip on his elbow to steady him, takes hold of his hand as well and pulls him to his feet just as _Liberator_ takes yet another hit.  Blake’s arms wrap around Avon as they struggle to keep their balance, and then the lights are glowing at full brightness and the engines power on around them like a song from the heavens. 

Blake turns his head to look around the room, laughing as the ship comes back to life, and Avon grins, basking in his delight, in the impressed and grateful look in his eyes when Blake turns his gaze finally back to him.

“Well done,” he says.  His eyes are crinkled around the edges and his expression is warm like a sun.  Avon’s smile grows.

“Oh, all in a day’s work,” he jokes back. 

And Blake leans forward and kisses him. 

Avon stills in surprise, and is not sure why he is surprised: Blake had to lean forward only two inches to bring their mouths together because Avon has been standing in his arms the whole time, pressed to his chest, and his arms are around Blake as well and he hadn’t even _noticed_.  One of Blake’s hands spreads wider across Avon’s back and Avon’s breath catches in his lungs.  His eyes fly open with shock, and when had they closed?  Slowly, Blake lifts his mouth away and puts some distance between them—arms still wrapped around each other but there’s space between their bodies; it feels like a galaxy’s worth of space after the feeling of being so close…

Blake looks into his eyes with no expression at all, and Avon stares back, absolutely poleaxed. 

“Ah,” he says cleverly.

“ _Blake?_ ” comes Vila’s voice over the room’s communicator.  “ _Blake, come quickly!_ ”

Blake releases him, turns, and walks from the room.  Avon stands for a moment on his own, not quite sure if he’s going to fall over.  His lips are wet.  He draws in a ragged breath, drags the back of his hand across his mouth absent-mindedly, and takes off after Blake.

 

~*~

 

“ _DSVII, come in.  Identify attacker.  Acknowledge receipt.  Acknowledge!  DSVII, come in!”_

“Who is it?”

“It’s another ship,” Jenna says.  “Another _Liberator_.”

“Why didn’t I listen to my dear old mum and do something safe with my life?” Vila mutters.

Jenna’s fingers hover over the communication switch.  “I can’t answer,” she tells Blake, helplessly.  “They’ll know for certain.”

“ _Engines were down.  Communication circuits have been knocked out and autorepair is offline.  Enemy ship, stand down!_ ” says the same voice, almost robotic.  “ _Stand down or we will open fire._ ”

They stand tensely on deck, waiting to see what will happen. 

“ _I am Supreme Commander Servalan of the Federation,_ ” comes her voice.  “ _That ship is manned by enemies of the state._ ”

“ _Deep Space Vehicle II is a ship of Spaceworld.  We do not acknowledge Federation authority.  You will stand down._ ”

“Plasma bolt has been fired and is running,” Zen states.

“ _Carn, no!_ ” Servalan shouts.  _Liberator’s_ twin fires and Carn’s ship explodes like an old-fashioned pyrotechnic light-and-colour show.  And leaves them a gloriously empty escape route.

“Jenna, get us out of here!” Blake shouts.  Avon grabs hold of the back of his chair to brace himself and hopes Gan and Vila don’t notice.  Jenna hits the thrusters and they blast off, leaving Spaceworld and Servalan far behind them.

“Well, that was exciting,” Vila says finally, when they’re sure they’re not being followed.

Blake clears his throat and turns to Jenna.  “Sorry about that, Avon,” he says.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says.  “I knew what you meant.”

He pulls something out of his pocket and flips it to her; she catches it one-handed and holds it up to the light, where it sparkles.  Blake hands the other to Avon.  “Thol gave me these.  Said to put them on your foreheads, and they’d do the rest.  Once a proper link is set up, everything should right itself.  Then it’s a simple matter of breaking the link.”

“I hope he told you how to do that?” Avon asks.

“Break the diamond.”

“That is simple.  He’s sure it won’t drive us crazy?  Or brain dead?”

Blake smiles.  “He’s sure.”

Avon nods to Jenna, and turns to go.

“Oh, one other thing.  Thol suggested we might not want to poke around in too many circuits in future, in case this sort of thing happens again.”

“That,” Avon points out, “is patently impossible, considering how often this ship requires maintenance and re-working.”

“I rather thought so.  I’d suggest programming some safety features into Zen to start with.”

Avon grins at him.  “Naturally.  Still, for all our sakes, perhaps it will be better if we stay away from the synthesisers in future.  Safer for them to remain as they are now.”

Blake shakes his head, and Avon and Jenna make their way up the stairs and down the corridor.  Behind then, Avon hears Vila say,

“Has Jenna decided to start acting like Avon, or did I miss something?”

Cally laughs.  “You missed something.”

 

~*~


End file.
